


The Company I Keep

by Grey_Amethyst



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Ableism, Abusive Relationships, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Content Warnings, Character Study, Coming of Age, Consent Issues, Cyclic Abuse, Date Rape, Dysfunctional Family, Eating Disorders, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Ephebophilic Character (Jefferson), F/M, Families of Choice, Gaslighting, Gen, Grooming, Kidnapping, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Other, Physical Abuse, Rape Aftermath, Recreational Drug Use, Sexual Abuse, Slow Build, Teacher-Student Relationship, Victim Blaming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 17:50:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 44,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10995915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grey_Amethyst/pseuds/Grey_Amethyst
Summary: Nathan is thirteen when his sister leaves Arcadia Bay – and him – behind for the east coast. Left to fill the role of Prescott heir in her absence, he feels his shortcomings dig a chasm where there were once fractures between him and his friends, his family, Victoria. Three years later, Mark Jefferson enters his life promising to smooth out the shatters. Nathan, desperate for anyone to make him feel whole, lets him in.(Nathan's lost years, in four parts.)





	1. When you're older I hope you can understand.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this fic is from a line in a LiS-inspired song, [_Undone_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4uo83J5CTA), by Koethe.
> 
> Another influence in this story is _Dreamland_ by Sarah Dessen. Many similarities are not conscious on my part - I did not have the book in mind while plotting this story - but some of Kristine’s character is inspired by a character in the book who was under similar circumstances. 
> 
> **Not all content warnings are listed.** Several warnings that aren’t tagged are only mentioned, non-explicitly, in a handful of chapters. I'll try listing some of the most unexpected or explicit ones under spoiler tags in the notes. Please message me here or on my [Tumblr](https://grey-amethyst.tumblr.com/) if you have any questions regarding content warnings. 
> 
> This story takes place before, during, and after base game canon events and follows pre-patch canon fairly faithfully up until Episode 5, with some exceptions; for example, Blackwell Academy is a four-year high school, and the patched correction for Victoria’s Everyday Heroes submission is followed. Due to a misunderstanding on my part, the Chase Space is in Portland; Victoria's family has a house there and a condo in Arcadia Bay, although Victoria grew up in Seattle -- this will explained throughout the fic.
> 
> I’m writing and posting this story chapter by chapter, which is new to me. Once the story has been completely written and posted, I plan on making some final revisions to lock everything together. Please bear with me!

 

In the aftermath, Nathan gets enough practice trying to unravel everything that he can cram nearly two decades of life in an hour if he doesn’t get sidetracked. He wishes it felt that simple, but sometimes he’s glad that looking back isn’t easy. It makes him feel like it’s all real, like he isn’t an imposter, like it didn’t matter only to him.

The muddled, shapeless voices whisper that the only way anything would’ve turned out differently was if he was different. The part of him that connects the pieces with detached revelation balances reality on the threshold of everything careening past him as he clutched at reminders of a softer world while it was happening.

For years, it was all he could do to keep himself from drowning. Now all he can think about is the ache of breaching the surface.

At night, his dreams come to him in navigating colorless hallways, following someone, needing to get somewhere and drowning with dread on the way there, losing something and not being able to find it no matter how hard he searched. He lies awake, damp with sweat or with his mind in a space other than his body, mulling over what happened over and over again.

They say he can start from the beginning. He always starts at a different one.

·

**Part I: The Other Prescott Heir**

·

**Chapter 1: _When you’re older I hope you can understand._**

·

When Nathan is thirteen, two significant events build the groundwork for a year, much later, that sinks poison into his already eroded being, leaving scars that linger and set the course of his adult life.

The second (which Nathan will always remember in clear, succinct detail, unlike the hazy outlines of the first) is his sister’s departure from Arcadia Bay, Oregon for the east coast. Her room, rumbling under the gust of the air conditioner beside her desk and the miniature fan behind her weathered mouse pad, was missing around a third of her packed boxes and all her suitcases. Her course catalog booklet from Stanford, where their parents met, dated, and married before setting off for the white sands of Florida long before Kristine, too, left, was laying on her bedside table, closed, its pages crisp and unfolded. Their mom thought it was an abduction for a single, hysterical moment before his dad rolled open Kristine’s closet and saw that the box containing her fleece-lined snow boots, upward of two hundred dollars and never used, was gone too.

Nathan, chilled in the humid air of late spring by the weight of his parents’ actual, palpable disappointment – more than Kristine getting a B on an exam or losing the election for Blackwell’s class president of 2009, more than her bowing her head in the backseat of the family car as his dad pressed into her the importance of discretion and their mom told her she was too pretty to be a lesbian – directed away from him for the first time, watched like a visitor to the house he grew up in. Sean Prescott’s stare only whipped to him as he seized the corded phone Nathan had only seen the house workers use before.

“Who’s that girl? The one your sister is dating?”

Kris and Melissa broke up at least a month ago, and though Kris had barely introduced them and he only really spoke to her one-on-one during that one week in the winter when their parents were vacationing in Spain for their twentieth anniversary, Nathan wills himself not to crumble under the coldness of his dad’s stare. He felt the space Kristine left widening already, his body inches from the crevice’s lip.

He told his dad the truth.

His dad’s stare lingered for a second or two. “And do you know her number? Did Kristine have her on her social media?”

“I don’t. I didn’t exactly get to know her.” Sean’s stare softened as Nathan felt himself go hard inside. He went on, feeling his chest lighten, “Probably. Let me go check.”

It should’ve felt like a betrayal. Nathan hurried but didn’t run to his own bedroom on the other side of the grand staircase, oak paneling with iron railings for a house on a hill that dwarfed nearly all buildings in Arcadia Bay. He glanced at his sister’s door, thinking of his dad and uncle, twenty years apart to Nathan and Kristine’s five, and wondered if their rooms were ever a matching set, if they even went to the same schools.

Only a month ago, just before final exams, his dad had drove out with Kristine to California to visit their campus. And he said it just like that, _their_ , patting his hand on his daughter’s shoulder with a look that hadn’t been in Nathan’s direction ever since they moved to Oregon, then their mom took Kristine’s hand, her engraved wedding band clacking against the cherry dining room table with the force of it, and Nathan sat and watched and wanted so fiercely it hurt.

That left Nathan with their mom, who implanted herself in Kristine’s life in much the same way that his dad would in his. It was days with minimal speaking, and Nathan wondered if their mom knew that, in spite of everything, him and Kristine always looked for Sean’s approval over her own. For a moment, he felt sorry for her, but then he thought that if she really wanted to have that role with Nathan she would have tried. He would tell her too, but she never incensed him enough to make him feel like saying it.

When Kristine and his dad came back she was decked with Stanford campus maps and a sweater one size too large and a slash of a smile only Nathan seemed to notice was drowned beneath Sean Prescott telling his wife that Kristine hit it off with his old economics professors and Elizabeth Prescott asking her daughter about the campus, if she had seen this residence hall or that campus center and which classes she should take and which orgs she should join. Nathan’s dad had their mom take pictures of the two of them, him in his matched suit, unwrinkled and unbothered by hours hunched in a car, her with her sweater, smiling with her teeth and standing with Sean’s arm around her shoulder. Then it was snaps with Kristine and her mom, and then Nathan’s dad looked to him, said, “Ah, Nathan, do you mind having us see if those photography classes finally paid off?” as he handed him the digital camera, its sides hot and a little sticky with sweat between Nathan’s palms.

He held it to his face, and took not a picture of Sean and Elizabeth and Kristine in the public dining room with its massive glass table and thousand dollar paintings, but his sister, staring at him from between her parents with an old look in her eyes and upturned, tired lips.

He wondered if she thought about Boston before then. He thought of their mom, crying for the first time in his memory, dignified tears over her pale face that made Nathan wonder if his dad hated when he sobbed just because the way he did it really was obnoxious. He thought of his dad, barreling past the threshold of Kristine’s room where Nathan later lingered, peering in its cool emptiness as if to check if she was really gone.

He pulled up Melissa Harris’s profile for his dad, and since he didn’t have her as a friend on Facebook he shot her a request too. She responded quickly, as if waiting for him, and Nathan didn’t hesitate before navigating through a few pages.

His dad patted him on the shoulders, just below the neck, and didn’t thank him, but Nathan felt his warm and almost unfamiliar approval billow inside him even after he checked Melissa’s profile once again later in the day, searching for some hint or clue of his sister’s whereabouts, only to find that he was blocked.

It took Kristine a few days to let them know she was alive. She called their parents first, and Nathan sat by the stairs, gazing into the entrance hall as their mom’s voice rose through the corridors.

Later that night she sent Nathan three texts.

_I’m so sorry I want to explain it all but I don’t know if I can do it right now._

_When you’re older I hope you can understand. I had to do this._

_Please stay strong Nate. I love you so much._

He barely finished the last sentence when he threw his phone into the wall and dug his nails into his scalp, willing himself not to scream. He only picked up his phone again, the screen cracked despite his sixty-dollar phone case, when he heard the ringtone he chose for Victoria, a shitty radio recording of _Poker Face_ she made for him one night when they were getting drunk off her parents’ wine and couldn’t agree on whether it was iconic or crap.

“She left,” he said before she could say anything, eyes squeezed shut, wanting a cigarette or a drink or _something_ to ward away this sickly familiar emptiness bone-deep inside him.

“I know. She texted me.”

The quiet that followed made him think that she was waiting for him to ask why. For a second Nathan wanted to hate Victoria too, as if she chose for Kristine to be her tutor in her afterschool program, as if she asked for Kris to introduce them a year ago to plaster the hole she would leave behind. He felt guilty almost instantly for that, and, trying to lance that awful feeling from his tightening chest, said, “Whatever. Fuck her. She’s just like my dad.”

Victoria, locked between a mentor whose favorite music she downloaded to her iPod and a friend who wrapped the desperate cuts over the insides of her elbows without judgment back when they barely knew each other, said nothing in response.

And like that, the constant presence that drew a gate between him and his classmates, him and his dad, him and the screaming static in his mind, was gone, whittled to texts and letters and the rare phone call Nathan ignored, and eighth grade became a realm of fits in class, slamming his fists against the walls inside the dark room in the manor’s basement, made a hand-me-down from Kristine by default, the back of his dad’s ringed hands and blurry hazes of pill after pill after pill after pill.

In the tremors of his sister’s decision, one that takes months for him to stop resenting, years for him to accept and even longer to understand, the other event fell in the gaps of his memory until the summer before his freshman year.

With his acceptance letter from Blackwell, Nathan received none of the pictures and sweaters and flags that his sister did. He didn’t expect any of the fanfare that Kristine got – the Prescotts were benefactors to both Blackwell and Stanford, but his grandpa, the man who had to die before Sean Prescott finally returned to Oregon, had seen in Blackwell the same inflated pride that his dad seemed to find in Stanford, and to not get into a school his family owned in all but name would be a true failure indeed – but it still drove a stake in his chest. Thankfully he’s at the point where he can find his own comfort.

Hayden and his brother drop him off at midnight at the bottom on the hill leading to the manor. He turns back to grin at them, and Hayden leans over his brother to say, “Text me if you survive, bro.”

He doesn’t really get why Hayden rolls shit and lights up when he is already the most relaxed person Nathan knows. His oldest brother, who in Nathan’s head is always in the driver’s seat of his sports car and rarely off the phone with his study partners from his master's program, only presses into him the importance of researching things before you take them and to never buy shit from shady assholes. He mentions Frank Bowers specifically, and Hayden laughs and Nathan does too though he’s never heard of the guy before.

Once he gets up the hill, he goes off the paved pathway to the main entrance and into the dewy grass ringing with crickets. He gets to the patio in the back, part of a renovation project finished around a year ago, and grabs a duffle bag hidden in the carefully trimmed bushes near the glass sliding doors. He changes his shirt right there, then kicks off his pants and tugs on a pair of khaki shorts as fast as he can. None of the windows on this side of the manor are lit up, but he notices a soft glow in the hallways past the panes of the back door. He pushes his worn clothes back into the duffel bag, shoves it back where it can’t be seen, and dabs some of the rollerball perfume Victoria gave him on a late school night that smells like fresh laundry over his wrists and neck. It makes him feel a little girly, but he shrugs it off. Better than his skin leaking pot fumes everywhere.

He sneaks inside with barely a sound, remembering Kristine carrying her high heels as she spirited herself upstairs, giving Nathan only a crooked, dazed smile as she passed him on the island bar in the reception hall where he was drinking ginger ale because his body ached and he couldn’t sleep. He wonders if his dad knew about the bottles hidden in Kristine’s room or if it was one of many things swept under the carpet like when Kris was caught after curfew with a girl on campus, marring the perfect public figure of the perfect Prescott heir.

Nathan isn’t surprised to find his dad at that same island with an open bottle of champagne beside him. He isn’t surprised to see that flash of anger in his dad’s eyes either, or the way he sets down his glass and steps easily down from the barstool Nathan has to hoist himself onto.

What does surprise him is the man who enters his vision as Nathan slows to a stop, standing beside and just a little behind Sean Prescott with a quirked smile.

“Ah, Nathan. You’re finally home.” The days of being able to slip by as the _other_ Prescott heir, the one who twitches and compresses himself in crowds, are over, but Nathan can’t help but let a grin bleed over his mouth. If Sean was to hit him in front of a guest, it would be even harder for him to slip by as the well-meaning, exasperated father with a troubled child. “We’ve been waiting for you for quite some time, you know.”

Nathan makes his expression even out. He looks at the guest again, and maybe the light shifted as he came closer, or maybe he was just too focused on his dad or Kristine to notice, but Mark Jefferson looks back at him with an amused smile.

“He mentioned your sister introduced you two years ago.”

Nathan blinks. The realization that Kristine, who in Sean’s language transformed into Nathan’s sister, Elizabeth’s daughter, left one year ago hits him like a too-long flash of studio light. A memory floats up, unbidden, of his dad speaking with Mark Jefferson at that dinner party a day after his thirteenth birthday. Nathan was latched to his dad’s side as Kristine, dethroned but never replaced, just tethered with more force into her role as the Prescott heir, snuck off with Melissa. He remembers that Kris told him about Mark Jefferson and how they should _network_ , in the learned business vocabulary Kris’s mouth rolled out with tight disinterest, for him to hear more about the industry and earn a career after school. _It’s never too early to start thinking of the future_ , she said, and Nathan wonders if even then she was thinking of leaving.

His chest is full of cotton. If he opens his mouth, he knows it’ll all swell out and his dad’s eyes will flash with dangerous promises, so he keeps quiet. It’s the wrong move, but not any more wrong than his other option, and Sean’s lips press into a line before he turns his head to Mark Jefferson. “It’s been tough, you know, without his older sister.”

And like that the fiber ignites, and Nathan feels his limbs shake, and even as every sensible part of him pleads with his mind not to let the fire out of his head, every other part of him screams with the need to tell his dad to go fuck himself, and how could he know what was wrong with Nathan and just throw medicine at him in place of actually talking about it, how dare he use Kris to save face in front of his man—

“I can imagine.” And when Sean turns back to Nathan, Mark Jefferson flashes Nathan a soft, kind of sad smile. He looks understanding. He looks pitying. Before Nathan can set himself on strained calm or more outrage, Mark Jefferson steps forward and extends his hand. There’s a silver watch on his wrist with a black leather strap. Thick black hair sprawls from beneath his white shirt cuffs. His eyes are deeply brown, wrinkled in the corners, one side of his mouth lifted a little higher than the other. “Mark Jefferson. Glad to see you again, Nathan.”

Nathan stares at him for a second, ignoring his dad’s building annoyance in his peripherals. He remembers that dinner party, Mark Jefferson’s hand on his shoulder feeling like his dad’s when Nathan tried walking away from a discussion that he knew would end with a slap to the face or him shoved aside to lose his footing and tumble to the floor. His dad never kicked him when he was down, but he did yell, spit insults and tell Nathan he was just like his grandfather, and somehow that comparison to a man he never met made Nathan curl up smaller, confused and lost and dirty on the manor floors.

Mark Jefferson had said he’d like to see him at Blackwell. While Nathan isn’t naïve or proud enough to think that he is extending his hand out of the kindness of his soul, he thinks of Victoria, how the scratch of her pen in leather-bound notebooks and days spent between him and Kristine fizzled into photography books with this guy’s name on the cover, how her parroting Kristine’s advice on school and careers became her buying new cameras and pulling Nathan away to try different techniques so they could be successful and famous just like Mark Jefferson. He thinks of the dark room in the basement and Kristine’s smile, the same kind as the one in that photo with her tucked between his parents and draped in Stanford gear, as she came out of it with sparse handfuls of unedited photos.

Victoria looks for his advice with photography even if she never explicitly asks for help, and Kristine always told him he had a gift.

When Nathan was a day into being thirteen years old, Mark Jefferson told him that a lot can change in a few years, and right now, a month shy of fifteen, Nathan feels its truth and thinks that maybe Mark Jefferson wasn’t just trying to impress his way into the Prescotts’ trust. For a fleeting moment, he imagines himself learning under Mark Jefferson’s guidance at Blackwell Academy, capturing just a bit of the talent and skill that made the man famous in the nineties, and, even for a moment, filling the gaps where Kristine took her ambition, her dad’s pride, her teaching Victoria late into the afternoon when she left them for the east coast.

But it crashes like everything else, and Nathan scrunches his nose at his dad’s earlier words. _Kris_ never introduced him to Mark Jefferson.

So, he’s just another liar after all, and Nathan is just a tremoring kid with an aching swell of a body and nothing impressive to call his own, not even his name, shared with his grandfather and at least one Nathan Prescott before them.

Nathan doesn’t think he’ll be in the mood to deal with his father’s rage, though, so he makes the corners of his lips cut up and shakes that hand. “Same here,” he says, flatly.

Mark Jefferson’s grip is strong, but Nathan doesn’t have to make an effort to release himself.

·

“Oh my god, are you serious?”

“Yeah,” Nathan says. His voice is smooth in a way it only ever is when he hears Victoria’s rare excitement. It took long months for them to inch close enough for those walls to dissolve at their own unique touch, and even so, Victoria’s giddiness was usually reserved for those shows she pretends she never watched, and those DVDs and books were giving way to eyeshadow palettes and photography manuals. She once let him read a story she wrote based on a show they watched together, and while Nathan didn’t really recognize the characters’ names he told her it was good. She didn’t look at him after and he felt himself sink into the floor, mentally going in loops trying to trace where he fucked up.

“Holy shit. Fuck, what did he say?”

“Nothing, really. He said him and my dad are still in talks about him bringing his, uh, teaching tour over to Blackwell—” he peels the phone from his chin and grins despite himself at the sound Victoria makes, “—but that my dad was thinking a permanent position would be more – how the fuck did he say it? – productive, or something.”

“Damn. Did he mention when he’d start?”

“Nah, neither of them said if they were, like, going forward with it or whatever. And then after that my dad – he was kinda really pissed at me – said I should get to bed because it was so fucking late.”

“Oh, wow, one in the morning isn’t the worst you’ve done. Shit, it’s not even the worst _Kris_ has done.”

And Victoria laughs, and Nathan matches that sound even as he feels it deepen that smoldering crevice just a tiny bit. “Well, uh, I guess Mark Jefferson is in a hotel in Portland or some shit, because I heard a car leave last night and Arcadia Bay isn’t creaming its pants right now.”

“I know, right?” Victoria’s chuckle is a little hesitant this time. “Fuck. God, I hope I can get to see him.”

“Didn’t you go to that book signing thing?”

“Yeah, like, a year ago with Kris.”

Nathan purses his lips and traches his thumb over the hinge of his MacBook on his desk. “Well. I mean, Victoria, I know you’re excited, but nothing guarantees he’ll teach here while we’re at Blackwell.”

“I know, I know.” There’s a pause, and in Victoria’s hesitation Nathan already knows what she’s about to say, and he flips his laptop open, forcing his gaze to hang on his dim reflection so he doesn’t say anything stupid. “I wish Kris was here. She would’ve never shut up about how we should _take advantage of this opportunity_.”

“Mm.”

“She, um, called me the other day—”

Nathan thinks of the nightly, then weekly, and now spontaneous illumination of his phone with Kristine’s name, the old profile picture she had on Facebook of her in her yearbook, eyes pinched in a grin alongside her Vortex Club friends, a bunch of affluent kids Nathan only met once when Kris whisked him off to some shitty after-party, high, he knows now. That was back in her sophomore year, and she apologized for that. All Nathan could think about then was how amazing alcohol felt in his veins and whether or not Kristine ever apologized to him for anything that mattered.

“—and she mentioned you. She wanted to know how you were doing.”

“What did you say?”

“…That you’re fine.”

“…And?”

“That…” He imagines Victoria pressing her index finger and thumb into the space between her perfect eyebrows, the way she always does when she knows there’s no way for her to say something that won’t spark a fuse in him, however small. “That you miss her.”

“Oh. Okay.” He laughs, and he knows it’s mean. The only reason he doesn’t feel guilty is because he knows Victoria isn’t scared and even if he tries so hard he ended up showing her his ugly insides anyway and she didn’t shrink away or even leave but shoved at him and clutched at the bandage at her inner elbow after she yelled. “Yeah, I’m so fucking okay that I’m drowning in how _normal_ and _boring_ it is at home. But I miss her for fucking ditching me— _us_ —so much, how will I ever function?”

“You don’t have to be like that, asshole,” Victoria says, voice low but not shy or secretive enough to be a whisper. “What else could I say?”

“That she can go fuck herself, for starters.”

“Nathan, I get why you’re pissed, but you won’t return her calls _or_ her letters. You don’t even go on Facebook because she keeps messaging you there too—”

“No I fucking don’t, but Kris didn’t ruin that shit for me—”

“What’s her profile picture right now?”

Nathan scowls. “I’m guessing it’s her with a perfect girlfriend on her right and perfect friends on her left and her new, perfect life free from small town hick bullshit.”

The silence that follows is thick. Nathan can tell that Victoria is waiting to see if he is finished. His breath is heavy on his cell and he can see blotches of red dotting his face in his laptop’s reflection. “Nathan,” Victoria finally says, no frustration in her tone like he expects, “it’s a picture of you and her back in Florida.”

He blinks fast and waits for his breath to go even again before he responds. “She hated me back then. Did she tell you that? All she did was pretend I wasn’t real.”

“She told me,” Victoria whispers. Her voice is all air now, words slow. “She said she wishes she could take it back.”

“She didn’t give a shit until they found out I was crazy.” This time he can’t stop the words from coming out in a wobble. He knows that Victoria understands why he has bruises streaked across his cheeks sometimes, why they come in rings of four or five around his arms, why he goes quiet at first when people touch him. But for just a second, he thinks about telling Victoria in words instead of wet, wild screams when it all gets too much.

He was eight when his grandfather died, and he didn’t understand why they had to move, just that his dad was like a broken monolith standing over that gravestone. Back then, he thought it all a _for now_ thing. And after all this time, he still expects his dad’s face to soften one day as he watches red swell up across Nathan’s face, hopes for him to sit down with him and talk like Kris did when she finished high school, and Nathan isn’t sure whether that says more about him or his dad.

 “I don’t care about her. I got by fine when she didn’t care.”

“…Nath—”

“Don’t. I get that, that she’s like your idol or whatever, but she’s been my sister a lot longer and didn’t act like that until…” Until she was new and friendless in Oregon and understood, even just a little bit, what it’s like being Nathan. “…I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone like this.”

“I’m not that desperate for someone that I’m gonna kill myself without you on the line,” Nathan says, and then he hangs up. He takes a deep breath and looks at himself in his laptop’s reflection. Staring back at him is a patchy-faced kid with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. Nathan looks at this ungrateful little shit of a kid and slams his laptop shut. He wonders if his dad will get him a new one if it’s cracked.

His phone lights up. Nathan turns it off. He rocks forward and buries his face in his knees. It’s amazing how his kneecaps just slot against his eye sockets. He thinks about pressing himself further until his eyes pop and ooze out of his skull. After gasping for a few minutes, he finally lifts himself up and rubs at his eyes. His throat hurts. He opens his bottom desk drawer and takes out his cigarette carton hidden in an empty pack of lightbulbs. Inside, only two cigarettes greet him. He swears and almost throws the carton against his window before he remembers the cigar he stole from his parents’ room. He hurries to his bed and tugs out his lockbox, given to him by his dad when things were good.

Nathan has his Zippo lighter, the cigar, and a few grams of weed inside covering the custom inscription on the bottom. The key is on his lanyard, tucked between his house key and that toaster keychain Hayden gave him with a huge grin, somehow thinking it was an oven, and when he unlocks the box he takes in that bitter, familiar smell.

With the cigar and cigarettes in his pockets, Nathan eases himself downstairs. He peers over the railing and around corners before finally getting to the back patio. In the hazy morning light, the compact bunches of flowers bordering it are red and glaring. He notices the ashtray at the table in the center of three woven chairs. His parents sit out here sometimes, always beside each other, their hands almost touching, coasters under their mugs and no newspapers, no phones, just them and a landscape of lawn and trees and sky and no one else.  

He hates them for that too.

Nathan lights his first cigarette and inhales, long and slow. The ash falls over the cobblestone at his feet. The raw ache in his gut subsides bit by bit until he can finally tuck it deep inside with everything else. He’ll apologize to Victoria later, and she’ll try not to bring up Kris again. He uncoils his back, too, each vertebra popping in sequence. The first cigarette is done before long, and he snuffs it out using the side of one of the rocks lining the circle of cobblestone. He shakes off the excess ash and shoves the butt in his pocket as he stands, steady on his feet.

He has just taken out the second one when behind him, he hears, “Aren’t you a little young for that?”

Nathan whips around. Mark Jefferson looks at him, quirking an eyebrow, lips curled in a grin.

Nathan glances around for his dad behind the glass doors shut behind Mark Jefferson, at the sides of the manor, and finally in the windows. When he doesn’t find him – and also notes that the windows are all shut – he scowls. “Fuck off. I think I’m old enough to handle a fucking lighter.” He lights up and takes a thick, ashy drag. His throat itches, but he holds in the smoke, balances the cigarette between his fingers, and billows it in Mark Jefferson’s direction. As his lungs bottom out he adds a perfect ring. “What,” he sneers, “are you gonna run off and tell my dad?”

And Mark Jefferson chuckles, shaking his head. “No, no… If this place is like anything I remember, I’d imagine you get enough of that from everyone else in Arcadia Bay.” He glances over Nathan, more inquisitive than measuring, and adds, “I’m just curious as to how you’re getting those in the first place. Even with all this editing software nowadays, fake IDs always have that certain…aesthetic, if you will.”

Nathan glares at him and takes another puff. He remembers that the last time Mark Jefferson saw him he was barely thirteen and still had his braces on. The old bastard probably didn’t even know how old he was then, let alone now. He’s not an idiot; he knows he can’t pull off eighteen, but this guy may as well have counted the pink bits of pigment on his cheeks. “I’ll be fifteen next month, not eleven and a half,” he says, “and you can quit it with the interrogations. Not like the police can do shit about it in this asscrack of a town anyway.” He’s pretty sure getting cigarettes isn’t even that illegal at his age, and it’s not like he does hard shit anyway. He takes his booze from his dad’s beer and wine cellar, just like Victoria, and Hayden buys pot and cigs from his own vast network of friends that Nathan and Victoria found too dense to even try navigating. Maybe if he had more kids trying to impress him than classmates who gaped at his jittering legs and the orange prescription bottles he scattered across his desk when rummaging through his bag, he could go to parties and try out that shit, but for now it was just a weekend here and there getting buzzed and watching movies with him and Victoria and sometimes Hayden, low-key and careful, always careful.

Mark Jefferson just looks at him, amusement in his eyes. “I’m sure,” he says, simply. He steps forward, and Nathan prides himself in how he doesn’t jerk back, but Mark just stands beside him, digging in his suit pocket for a moment before he takes out his own carton.

Nathan snorts, but he doesn’t miss how it’s almost full. “Wow, fuck. So you’re just gonna light up with Sean Prescott’s son?”

He chuckles in response, slipping one cigarette in his left hand as he puts the rest back in his pocket. “Trust me, I was doing much worse than you at your age.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, I’m serious. You’d need something to get by too, being in the Vortex Club with your father.”

Nathan barks out a laugh, and it embarrasses him even before it leaves his mouth. He goes back to his cigarette instantly, watching Mark Jefferson in his peripherals. He has one of those business bags over his shoulder. Nathan wonders how he can get by, wearing a black suit in an Oregon summer.

“Ah.” He looks to him, head tucked a little, self-deprecating, Nathan thinks, to go along with this relatable shtick. “I’m afraid I forgot my lighter inside.”

“Oh. Sure,” Nathan says. He hands his own over. Their fingers brush and Nathan blows smoke from the corner of his mouth opposite Mark Jefferson. He takes a long drag, looking out to the grass extending to the peak at the borders of the Prescott property, edged with manicured trees that become oozing tendrils against the night sky. There’s a view of the ocean a little over halfway past the lawn. At the edge, Arcadia Bay is visible, and from old photographs Nathan knows those trees, only about forty years old, block the miserable landscape today. “Busting out of this hick town already?”

“Hm?”

He hears his lighter being flicked. “Your bag. Did this shit with my dad fall through or what?” Nathan sucks on his cigarette again but this time it’s tight, embers dying at the end, and he sighs, snuffing the filter out and shoving it in his pocket too. He decides smoking the cigar will make him look like a stupid kid pretending to be a grownup right now, so he just stands there, breathing in the new, different wisps of Mark Jefferson’s smoke amid the distant sea breeze. He sees the glint of his lighter in the corner of his vision, and when he looks to get it back, the carton is there too.

“I have the feeling you need this more than me,” Mark Jefferson says, smiling.

Nathan pinches his brows and almost says something, but he decides that free cigarettes isn’t something he can just turn down, and besides, not too long ago he heard his dad berating the Blackwell principal on the phone for being an alcoholic, and drinking is easy enough to hide. Maybe this is just an art teacher thing. His first photography tutor told him his twitching and verbal tics were his inner self seeking an outlet through artistic expression.

It's the most creative way Nathan has been called crazy.

Nathan stares down at the carton for a moment and squints. “I don’t recognize this brand.” He takes one out anyway.

“I’d be surprised if you did. They’re manufactured in England. I know it's obnoxious, but they were at my first magazine shoot.” Mark Jefferson smiles, a faint, almost wistful expression that Nathan stares a little longer than he probably should. He lights his cigarette and takes a drag, but it doesn’t feel any different from the ones he has scrounged up here and there. Maybe the paper is more durable or something. “Ah. I didn’t answer your question, did I?”

Nathan pauses, then remembers. “Oh yeah. What’s with that bag, anyway? You got more of this shit or something?”

“No, no,” and just a hint of a laugh in his voice. “Sean – your father – and I were speaking this morning. He mentioned your sister dabbled in photography for a while—”

Nathan presses his eyes shut to keep himself from rolling them.

“—but you’ve always had more of a passion for it. He said that the manor's dark room pretty much became your own.”

Nathan doesn’t reply, but he does feel the corners of his lips lift up. He can’t really think of a time where his dad looked at his photos beyond the family pictures Nathan was left to set up during holidays and birthdays. Christmas memories are lined with him setting the timer then diving into the frame as his family came to life around him, his mom’s eyes bright and his dad’s arms wrapped around his children. When the last flash faded, leaving splotches behind their eyelids, the façade fell apart and Nathan went to look for pictures good enough to develop while his dad returned to his study, his mom to her paintings, and his sister to her room to press herself into her phone with her girlfriend on the other line. Even if it’s a lie – his talent, his dad’s matter-of-fact acknowledgement of it – it’s a lie that Nathan has told himself enough for it to feel like the truth.

“He also showed me your portfolio.”

Nathan stepped back, eyes wide as Mark Jefferson stared at him, brows raised. “My _what_?” Nathan asked.

“Your portfolio? It was on the desk, beside the printer—”

“That’s not my portfolio,” Nathan said slowly. His mind starts racing, and he wipes his hands on his jeans, trying to keep them from shaking. He thinks of the ones he has taken recently. There were normal ones, Hayden and his brothers in a chess match, the board at an isometric angle, emphasizing Hayden pointing at a piece and staring at his scientist brother intently. Victoria standing on the beach, displaced at the right of the frame, her thick, blonde hair splayed down her blouse, facing the ocean as the sun set filled the rest of the shot. They had that idea for a few weeks, but she wanted to take it after she got her hair dyed.

But then there are the other ones. The _real_ ones, the ugly photos that are carved out of the poison in Nathan’s mind. He can’t have had Mark Jefferson see that and then talk to him, knowing how wrong he was, pretending he wasn’t. Then none of it was real, the cigarettes tainted too, and Nathan brushed his hair back and turned away, taking a few steps closer to the manor, hands clasped at the crown of his head. He rolled his palms downward, to his neck, and that helped him calm down a little, but nothing could stop the images in his head of the seagulls with their stomachs burst open with plastic, the squirrel caught up and dead on an iron fence post, the mouse in a glue trap, eyes wide and frightened. Nathan didn’t help that last one, didn’t even know how and it’s not like mice are endangered or anything but he remembers how its entire body heaved when he came close, its free whiskers twitching, desperate squeaks rumbling from its little muzzle.

He can’t have Mark Jefferson making any reference to his skill and talent and knowing how dirty he is. He _can’t_ , and it makes his insides curl, his eyes burn behind his eyelids.

“Nathan… I didn’t realize that wasn’t meant for public eyes.”

“It was on _my_ fucking desk,” Nathan says. He finally turns back, and his vision blurs at the corners for a second before he settles his gaze to glare at him. “That’s _my_ dark room, those are _my_ photos, I don’t give a shit what my dad says and what arrangement you and him are making. You don’t get to, to fucking decide everything is—” Nathan forces himself to stop and swallows. His words are starting to tumble. If he goes on like this, he’ll really look like a lunatic.

Mark Jefferson looks at him, and he doesn’t smile, doesn’t look amused, he just looks a little sad, a little pitying, and Nathan feels himself swell up instantly. “If I had known,” he started, flicking at his cigarette in his hand a few times before his shoulders dropped a bit and he sighed. “I’m sorry. But for what it’s worth, in all my years in the industry, you might just have the greatest natural talent of any—”

“Oh, cut the shit.” And Nathan laughs again, one of those ugly ones that makes people cringe, not because it’s funny but because Mark Jefferson’s lips press into a flat line then, looking at Nathan as if he’s searching for something and he just can’t find it. “If you want a bigger salary, go teach at a fucking university. There’s a reason Arcadia Bay is run by one family. If you want a Prescott that’s easy to impress, go send Kris a plane ticket to Europe or something.” The words are bitter out of his mouth and he regrets it when he sees Jefferson’s eyes focus on him differently now. He steadies himself and draws up tall. Mark Jefferson must have at least a foot of height on him but Nathan’s not the one with something to lose.

But Mark Jefferson doesn’t latch onto it. Maybe if Nathan was harsher, made some snide comment about how Jefferson’s career fizzled out over a decade ago or how he’s in his forties but never seemed to be seen with a girlfriend, or boyfriend for that matter, he would have, and it would’ve solidified Nathan’s hate for him forever. Instead, Mark Jefferson says, delicately, “I was planning to speak with you about it in the first place. Sean made copies of them.” Then he goes into his bag, pulling out a manila envelope, and Nathan recognizes that exact series of photos because that’s the original folder, from the green ink on the tab to the little sketch Victoria drew in red on the cover.

“That’s _mine_ ,” Nathan snarls, and when he storms up to Mark Jefferson the height difference seems filled in by his blazing anger, his simmering embarrassment, and Jefferson does nothing to stop him from snatching the portfolio back.

Nathan moves back to his prior position and lifts his fingers to his mouth but doesn’t find a cigarette butt to greet his lips. He looks down to find it on the ground, its tip still red, at least an inch left on it. Nathan grinds it with his heel, face so hot he knows he must be stark red but he doesn’t care, because those were _private_ , the dark room where him and Victoria developed pictures in gentle silence, the folder stuffed with pictures he took to show Victoria light and dark contrasts against the sun and sea, the ones he tucked there because he couldn’t imagine anyone would see them: snapshots of Victoria’s head thrown back in laughter, her sitting with a graphic novel balanced on her knees, the two of them smirking at the camera with smoke from a joint, just below the frame, billowing between them.

“Go fuck yourself,” Nathan says to Jefferson’s silence, and he doesn’t even look for any offense or anger drowning out the pity on his face, just slides open the glass doors and slams them behind him. He kind of wishes they would shatter, too, splattering his humiliation across the tiles and white walls like it should instead of letting it fester in his mind like it does all the time.

·

Nathan’s portfolio is still intact when he leaves through it. He recognizes the day he took most of these pictures; they’re almost all of him and Victoria, and in the order he remembers too: the forest, the pier, the beach, walking through the sandy, thick-aired streets. The one with him looking over his shoulder, lips downturned in a perplexed grimace as Victoria’s hand grips at his fingers in the foreground, is poorly shot with the empty pavement taking half the frame beside his expression only because Victoria was trying to set it up in the same instance she lifted her camera, but Nathan usually knew when people were watching him.

He thumbs through it twice just to check that nothing is out of place. He almost wants to, just to have an excuse to throw those insults he didn’t say last time at Mark Jefferson, but everything he remembers is there. Thankfully he hid away his dead animal pictures elsewhere, probably in one of the many filing cabinets in the dark room. Nathan wanted to fill more of them, to outpace Kristine in the only way he knew he could, but looking back at his shots makes him cringe. He picks out errors even in the ones where him and Victoria were both hoping for something more than trying to pinch together memories of one carefree summer day: excess space here, poor lighting in the corner, their eyes squinting against the sun, making them look irritated despite the wild grins pulling on their cheeks.

His favorite is the one of Victoria pretending to be asleep, face soft beneath her sunglasses, the glint of light at the corner of one of her lenses taking attention away from the expanse of her collarbones and tank top, white and airy on top of her sun towel, the black background made earthy with dry, hot sand. He only meant to glance at her, but his stare lingered a second too long. She lifted her prescription sunglasses when she caught him, mouth bursting into a laugh. _Does it look good? Hang on, wait a little bit before you get it. I think I actually fell asleep for a second._ He readied himself, steadying his hands after rubbing his thumb at the grains of sand stuck on the lens.

And he took the shot.

While Victoria is sharp and monolithic among anyone else – during the open house for incoming Blackwell first-years, she got one boy to sneak into the hall where the parents were eating finger foods and measuring their children’s achievements against one another and promptly handed the water bottle the boy refilled with champagne to Nathan, who cackled as he sucked it up, hating the taste but loving that downtrodden look on the kid’s face – she was infinite with Nathan, and together they filled up the gouges left by missing and disappointed parents as best they could, leaving each other filled with hasty gauze but no longer inflamed at the seams.

She didn’t answer her phone when Nathan called her twice earlier, and he can feel those gaps widening, the sickness in him spilling over as he tries smoothing himself back down. Nathan hates that he can’t do it on his own. He hates that if Victoria finally had it with her dad and her step-mom and the gallery that had a young artist section one season and never slipped even one of Victoria’s best photos between color pencil landscapes and abstract watercolor paintings, she would be able to make it without any help. And he hates that it’s hard for him to still be mad at Kristine when it’s so easy to understand something Victoria might do in the far-off future.

He ends up talking to Hayden, because while Victoria is a constant during bad times, all three of them share most of the easier good times. Nathan first met Hayden when he was flirting with Victoria before class and didn’t seem to get how she was trying to inch away. Nathan stormed between them to confront this new kid who obviously hadn’t even gotten the order for his uniform jacket in yet. Nathan didn’t call himself Victoria’s boyfriend or anything, and Hayden didn’t ask, but later Hayden told him that he backed off first because he hadn’t noticed until then that Victoria was uncomfortable and second because Nathan wasn’t intimidated by how his shoulders strained the back of his borrowed jacket.

Sometimes Nathan thinks that he’s just after something, but Hayden so rarely passes judgment that maybe that’s okay. Nathan just tells him about his dad, Mark Jefferson, and the photos, and Hayden falters at his trailing silence before replying, “Oh. … _Oh_. You mean, like, _those_?”

“No.” He only caved to his urges with someone else once, when he and Hayden were out at the edge of the forest, a few minutes past snuffing out their joints and laughing about something stupid that happened at school. He can’t remember what. But then he almost stepped on it, recognized it as a rabbit only by its ears because the body was splayed apart, the flies, disturbed by his motion, abandoning their larva in the stinking guts. Nathan blinked down at it, and that cold, familiar feeling came over him, the one where he doesn’t have to think, doesn’t even feel like he’s in his body, and he paced around the corpse as he fished in his bag, looking for the best shot. Hayden said nothing, and Nathan would have forgotten him if not for his outline in his peripherals, not close enough for his shadow to fall into the frame but near enough for Nathan to dimly wonder how to get him away. Nathan fell to his stomach, catching an angle with the rabbit’s ears pointed toward the lens, its innards gelatinous and bloated against the softly blue afternoon sky in a break between the trees. With a couple of snaps came the fall, Nathan feeling dirty and wrong, and he tried going deeper in the forest before Hayden herded him the other way, silent, the two of them not looking at each other.

“Oh.” In his silence Nathan knows Hayden doesn’t get it. They’re just pictures, but they’re mostly him and Victoria, the two of them brimming with life against the lens and while the shots made him smile when he printed them all out with his dad’s yells from earlier in the day ringing in his ears, through anyone else’s eyes he just looks like a kid under the impression that a day out with a girl was worthy of anything for public consumption.

He’s stupid, and it’s not real, just a fucked-up show of Mark Jefferson trying to get his dad to throw a couple of thousands into his salary offer by impressing his amateur photographer kid, but he’s freaking out, like always, and he doesn’t know why it matters this much.


	2. "You and me, right?"

·

**Chapter 2: “You and me, right?”**

·

He starts texting Victoria a few hours after he wakes up to the dark nothingness of his room and can’t keep himself still, let alone fall back asleep. Victoria responds with _Yeah._ and _Sure._

Nathan feels sick, wonders why he fucks up so bad, so often, and doesn’t bother trying to fix it when it matters. He bows his head over his desk, face in his hands, willing himself not to start reeling straight into the ground. She’s the only one who can understand but she _can’t_ , and maybe some of that is her head not having the pictures and sounds and the occasional whisper like Nathan’s but more of it is Nathan wanting them to meet at another point, at _his_ point, even when he saw the way Victoria looked at his sister with that glowing admiration spilling everywhere, leaving Nathan to struggle to keep up even when Victoria fell into step with him.

He needs something to smoke. Rolling up with his dad doing business goes beyond Nathan’s typical stupidity, as he puts it for far simpler offenses, so that’s out of the question. Instead he launches himself at the lockbox under his bed and goes for the cigar.

But it’s not there.

Nathan stares at the space it once was, unmoving. Then he blinks, laying the box back down, and staggers to his laundry basket. He shoved his gross clothes and the duffle bag in with another load before he went to bed, but his clothes from yesterday are still wrinkled inside. He sifts through the pockets. The carton of pretentious cigarettes plops on his wood floor unceremoniously. The filters from his own are still there too. It makes no sense for him not to notice it fell from his pocket, but then again, maybe it fell when he stormed off with his portfolio.

He swears. Places his hands over his eyes. He doesn’t remember having it at Hayden’s when he came over later in the afternoon, so that’s probably the case, or worse, he dropped it inside. One of the cleaners probably handed it off to his dad.

It’s just a cigar. Chances are his dad will think he’s just a regular teenage fuckup, won’t assume that he’s been stealing other things too. It shouldn’t bother him this much, he knows, but it builds on a swelling fracture he can never seem to learn to deal with no matter how hard he tries and now he’s teetering, fearful of the next push of weight that will make him splinter and crumple or burst in one of those meltdowns that does nothing but embarrass him afterward. At least it’s the summer. He’s so sick of fucking up in class.

Better to face his dad on his own terms rather than fumble uselessly when he isn’t detached enough to try getting his dad not to hit him.

Nathan washes his face in his bathroom and watches his skin brighten with patchy pink splotches in the foggy mirror. His hands feel like they’ll blister under the faucet. He’ll pick at them if they do, leave sores and scabs open and start freaking about them getting infected. It happened before. His mom told him to stop, said he’d look like a drug addict if he didn’t.

Down the hall, the door to his father’s study is open. Nathan takes a moment to watch for shadows moving on the floor. Back when he was a kid he always checked for his dad that way. He wasn’t allowed to knock when the door was closed.

He goes downstairs. It’s mostly dark, the entrance hall left murky with the chandelier off. The old thing is one of few antiques his dad left alone when he made all those renovations after they moved to Oregon, maybe because it’s an obnoxious declaration of old money. Probably not because of how the glass’s reflection splits and pools all around in just the right way when the sunrise hits.

He turns the corner into the reception hall and, of course, Mark Jefferson is there, staring down at his phone with an unimpressed look on his face. Nathan scowls and doesn’t bother trying to hide it when the man looks up, face softening, apologetic. “It’s fucking five in the morning,” Nathan says. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s five in the evening.”

Nathan knows how stupid he must look by that patience in Mark Jefferson’s eyes. He pushes up his sleeve and checks his watch, a Burberry Victoria gave him for his previous birthday. The littler clock faces don’t help since he never bothered setting them, but it’s definitely just about five. Nathan glances at the window, the curtains drawn, and tries to remember if it was raining or something when he woke up.

“It’s fucking creepy,” Nathan says, voice hoarse in the haze of his mind, “you being here, like, three days in a row. Don’t you have other shit to do?”

His dad has invited people over like this sometimes; one of them was for the real estate project his dad was planning in a few years. Sean Prescott told him and Kristine, back when they were kids, that Lyndon Johnson and Winston Churchill used to conduct their business half-dressed and in the bathroom. It’s a power play, Nathan thinks, like his dad could spare the time but not the formality. He wonders if getting a famous photographer from the nineties is really that big a deal to him.

Mark Jefferson gives him a neutral look. Nathan notices the glass in Mark’s hand, another on the island bar, stained with a ring of red lipstick. If his parents didn’t take time off every anniversary, Nathan would be concerned. Instead, he understands that this is his mom being wife, woman, and business partner, only ever coming to life when it came to the company or his dad.

“Well, Blackwell is one of Sean’s primary business pursuits.”

Nathan barks out a laugh. “Yeah. We call it philanthropy.”

He gets a deeply carved smile in return. It shouldn’t soothe his annoyance. Nathan finds himself unsure if this is happening. It wouldn’t be the first time he saw someone who wasn’t there; Kristine haunted the corners of his vision sometimes too but never answered him. “An heirloom from his predecessor, I believe.” Mark Jefferson looks toward him, but not _at_ him, and Nathan thinks that maybe they had an argument, this man and one or both of his parents. He’s not sure why else he’d be distracted right now. Nathan watches him narrow his eyes, hand coming up to trace over his beard, and then, “I made a mistake.”

His glass is empty. Nathan blinks up at him and feels himself go stiff, legs already bracing to move back.

“I feel like I owe you an apology, for earlier.” Oh. The sting of humiliation aches deep in Nathan, and he shifts his weight on his legs, rubbing at his right wrist, trying to be nonchalant even if that’s a look he can’t really pull off right now. “I should have realized just how personal those photos were to you.”

It’s the first time an adult ever admitted fault to Nathan. Here and there the house workers would excuse themselves, but not for any real mistakes, not the intentional coldness on his mom’s part or the thinly disguised disgust on his dad’s. Nathan parts his lips and tries to say something. Mark Jefferson doesn’t have that pitying look on his face. His throat works, and he swallows and immediately regrets it; Mark Jefferson might think the bob in his throat means Nathan’s about to cry or something, and he says, quickly, “Shit happens. My dad was the one who showed you them anyway.”

“The crazy thing is I – ah, well, I’ve been teaching for a few years now, and the habit can be hard to kick. I ended reviewing your shots.”

Nathan can feel his cheeks starting to heat up. Victoria would be equal parts excited and envious if she heard this, and he knows instantly that he can never tell her. Mark Jefferson might be trying to impress Nathan to get to his dad, but having a famous photographer critique his shots is more than Nathan deserves. He hopes Mark Jefferson tore into his photos just so he won’t be as embarrassed looking through them. Deep down, he hopes there’s at least one picture with actual criticism on it, a genuine suggestion of how to frame this or angle that, anything that’ll make it feel real.

Mark Jefferson goes into his bag. Nathan takes the moment to duck his head down and clear his expression. Just earlier he was worried about his dad hitting him for stealing. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how he feels right now or how he felt back then because what he felt didn’t always make sense. The thought hangs low in his gut but it keeps him intact, distant, as if he’s just watching his body, his eyes cool and mouth firmly set.

“Here.” The manila envelope in Mark Jefferson’s hand is impersonal, none of Victoria’s drawings on it, Nathan’s own shaky scrawl that drove his dad mad with how big it got sometimes. “If you’re interested. Otherwise—”

“No, um.” Nathan takes the envelope. He flips through the contents briefly, checking if they’re all there, and he sees mark-ups, even sticky notes over darker areas. Nathan dimly notes that the photocopies aren’t even pixilated or low resolution. He doesn’t think he ever used that machine in his dark room for something other than printing from his camera before. Nothing seems out of place. No dead animals. He isn’t sure if he should thank Mark Jefferson. He isn’t even sure if he wants to be here. But he keeps his face unaffected, despite knowing he’s not as good as Kristine or Victoria at it, and nods, curtly.

Mark Jefferson stares at him, gaze flickering, and Nathan feels so stupid, so small. It didn’t matter, back then. It doesn’t matter right now, not with his unsteady fingers curled around those copies. Not with him being awful for no reason. But Nathan doesn’t apologize, doesn’t thank him, and Mark Jefferson says, “I have to say, Nathan, you have a gift.”

Everything halts. Nathan feels his mind go hollow, his body tucked under sand. He wants to start yelling. Not real.

“The shadows, the contrast… You’re years ahead of your time, Nathan.” A smile cuts into Mark Jefferson’s face like a blade. “Hard to believe you’re only fourteen.”

It stabs through the numbness. Nathan presses his lips tight and glances away. He’s still just a kid after all. Just Sean Prescott’s brat, meant to be salved like an abrasion with one hand and the other outstretched, palm-up, expecting compensation. Required kindness, like his dad not insulting his prints, Kristine cooing over his landscapes, Victoria smelling of soft perfume and pressed to his side as they flipped through his camera after a day out.

Nathan grimaces, says something about how he’ll go looking for his dad, and leaves down the hall, out the front door. He has to double back to shut it.

He goes down the hill of the manor’s driveway and veers off the path as the steepness levels, entering the expanse of woodland his family owns.

When he’s deep enough in to not see the road anymore, he swears and slams his fists against a tree trunk, then stands there with his breath thick between his reddening face and the bark.

It shouldn’t bother him so much, but shrouded in humid air with his breathing drowning out the hum of birds overhead, he goes back to thinking, like he always does, always in the pitiful jut of motivation left in the eroded plateau of his mind, whether any of it matters after all.

·

His dad ends up hitting him the next day. Nathan is off the manor’s property when his thoughts go slow enough to realize that he can’t walk around looking like this. He can’t really see his phone’s screen but the finger strokes are more ingrained in him than straightening his sheets in the morning or rolling up a joint.

“Nathan—”

“Can we meet?”

In the silence, he can tell she can’t really believe him. Or rather she can _believe_ him, maybe, but not understand him. “Nathan,” Victoria replies, voice measured, “I can’t just…fucking, go out to see you whenev—”

“Please,” Nathan whispers, gulping hard past the wriggling clench of his heart. His throat tightens and he blinks fast, looking at the road on either side of him, no traffic, not yet, but he stumbles past the white line and into the claylike dirt anyway. “I need—I can’t—”

“Meet me by the beach. Call me when you get there.”

“O-Ok—”

“ _Be there_ ,” Victoria says, slow in that way she uses when she needs to talk to strangers or speak up in class.

She hangs up, and Nathan rubs his eyes. His left one flakes and aches at the touch.

It wouldn’t be that bad if Nathan kept quiet after the initial embarrassment of getting slapped like a child having a tantrum, but he started pushing. They yelled at each other before but usually Nathan knows where to stop. He always loses to his dad but usually he knows when he is defeated. He knows not to push. But being slotted into the space carved out for his sister with none of the praise cut deep. He isn’t sure, later, why this argument tipped over.

He flinched hard before his dad’s hand whipped at him, fast, almost instinctive as usual, and the typical blinding humiliation was still there but dulled as if layered over by scar tissue. His dad’s face was severe in its harsh lines, and Nathan snapped.

He told his dad that if he actually gave a shit about the family legacy he wouldn’t have been such an asshole and driven away the only person who could actually take it up.

His dad, maybe realizing what Nathan was doing, went steady, the color going even on his face. He asked Nathan what he knew of family and duty with how ungrateful he is and said at least Kris being a disappointment was a surprise.

And Nathan replied, “Yeah, I’m sure you know all about that, seeing as how you only came crawling back to this nowhere piece of shit town when _your_ dad died—”

Maybe he did see the blow coming. But his dad’s hand wasn’t open for a slap. It wasn’t solid like a punch, so he probably tried to uncurl his fist before it made contact.

Nathan sometimes fell to the floor from losing balance to a shove or backing up too fast. His dad never hit him hard enough to knock him off his feet before.

He was so stunned, laying on his side, that he scrambled up on an elbow and looked at his dad before filling his emptied lungs.

And Nathan’s dad stood there, face ashen, eyes wide, hand still in the air. His engagement ring, embedded with Nathan’s mom’s birthstone, was speckled red. Nathan didn’t even notice the blood trickling down his own brow bone.

For a moment, and only a moment, Sean Prescott glanced at his ring, mouth twisting, as if he couldn’t really figure how he got his son’s blood into the gold insignia. As if he couldn’t believe what he just did.

And for a longer moment, Nathan felt sorry for him.

Even when his dad left him bleeding on the floor without another word or look, even when Nathan passed his mother lingering with pale cheeks just inside the entrance hall to watch him leave and said nothing, even when he started feeling sweat bead at his forehead because the air conditioners inside were turned too high and he forgot he had a sweater on until he was already down most of the hill and getting dizzy, all he could think about was how ridiculous that was.

Nathan, blinking past the blood starting to dribble and pool in his eyelids, feeling sorry for his dad. Nathan, alone on the hardwood floor and slipping on shaking limbs as he stood up, feeling sorry for him. Nathan, the unwanted namesake of a man his dad hated enough to avoid for over a decade on the Florida beachfront, feeling _sorry_ for him.

He rubs at his eyes with his fists again. His cheek feels hot. The blood seems to have mostly stopped, but now it’s gooey and he can’t wipe it off his skin. That side of his face is to the road but no one stops. He doesn’t even look toward the cars to see if they’re gawking. Thankfully it’s the early morning on a cloudy, sticky-hot weekday, so very few people are around.

When he gets to the beach, he unties his sweater from around his waist. _Very middle school-chic_ , he imagines Victoria saying, and he gets out his phone to text her instead of calling, settling on one of the stone barricades by the sand as he waits.

She ends up calling him. “I’m almost there. You’re at the beach, right?”

“You told me to tell you when I got here.”

“But you’re there.”

“Yeah. Like…right where you enter. Past the parking lot.”

Victoria clicks her tongue. “Okay, I got it.”

The air is salty. His face hurts. Nathan stands, leaving his sweater, and folds his hands behind his head, turning and staring down the barricade and then the ocean. The Prescott Foundation made a big push toward making the shore clean in the past decade. He remembers going on a boat with Kristine when they first moved to Arcadia Bay and seeing whales breach the surface. The tour guide said they can consume debris and starve to death on plastic, but Nathan found the thought of something so huge living deep in the ocean and chained to coming up for air more disturbing.

He senses Victoria before he hears her, and he closes in on himself, elbows going forward, teeth worrying at his lip.

“Hey,” she says, not needing to carry her voice.

“How’d you get here so fast?” he asks. He’s a little proud of how it sounds, more like he’s about to burst like an overripe fruit than crumble into the sand around them.

“I was at Two Whales – the skeevy-looking diner with the ugly sign – with those girls from the orientation. Oh my god, they’re so—”

She pauses at his left side. Nathan doesn’t think he’ll ever know how she tunes into these things so quickly. There’s not enough space between him and the barrier for her to see without moving him, but she comes in slowly, stretching her hand out far enough for Nathan to notice, something he’s always wanted to tell her how grateful he is for, before easing her fingers on his arm. He offers no resistance, and he drops his hands when he hears her sharp intake of breath.

“Nathan, what…?” He can’t look at her. She figures it out a lot quicker than most other people would. “Sit down. Shit. I’m calling Hayden—”

“No you’re not—”

“Fuck off with that attitude, Nathan. Not now. We need a fucking car because we can’t, fucking, handle this out here with no privacy—”

“Oh yeah, great idea, _real_ private with Hayden and his latest score, wow, how fucking considerate of you—” He falters when she pushes him, his heel sinking low into the loose, hot sand, and when he looks, her dark eyes are narrowed tight and unblinking. He sniffs and turns his head down, wiping his hand over his trembling mouth.

“You don’t get to talk to me like that.” He looks back up at her, and now he sees hurt, actual hurt, and he imagines her with that look when he hung up on her and tries not to let his face crumple. “No matter what happens to you, you don’t get to treat me like that.”

He nods, unable to manage much else.

Victoria doesn’t offer her hand, doesn’t step forward, but softens her gaze. “I’m on your side, Nathan. Don’t act like I’m not.”

“Yeah,” he says, head jerking up and down once.

Victoria looks at him as if searching for something in his eyes. She opens her mouth again, presses it closed, and then, looking like she found what she was looking for, says, “You and me, right?”

His mouth wobbles. “Right.”

She guides him to the barricade again with her palm soft on his arm. While he sits, she takes out her phone and starts calling, one hand on her hip, glancing over Nathan and at the sea behind him. Nathan, stricken by the idea that he has stared at her for too long, turns his gaze away. His nose is starting to run. His entire head has become a swelling throb, like his skull is readying itself to breach the scalp. Maybe they’ll have to open him to up to drain the fluid, pop his brain out and clean every filthy crevice in it.

When Victoria sits beside him, he just barely registers her knees pressed into his leg as she angles herself toward him. He moves his head when she guides his face toward her. This close, he can see the concealer under her eyes, her ever-present blush dusted over the apple of her cheeks, soft like that look in her eyes. Her Louis Vuitton purse is on the ground among sand and weeds snaking between cracks in the asphalt. She has a half-empty bottle of spring water in one hand and tissues in the other.

“I’m just going to wash the blood off,” she tells him. He can feel her breath, strained and warm.

“Okay.”

She spills some directly on him first. It loosens a bit of the dried blood, and she starts wiping with the tissues down his cheek. It feels like she has an entire dispenser in her purse with how often she has to rub and replace them. She goes for his chin next, and that concentration makes him blush. Maybe there’s one good thing about his face bruising. She hesitates when she goes back to his eye. “Can you—?”

“Sure.” He takes a napkin and starts wiping at his skin, raw from rubbing, and it’s probably not the best idea for him to do this, because his eyebrow is itching and when he reaches up there he feels it, the warm, gooey split of skin just beyond the bend of his temple, almost big enough for his fingertip to slip into.

“Shit.” Victoria staunches the new bleeding but not before another drop rolls in his eye. It stings awfully, and he wonders if it registered to him when he first got the cut. He brushes the worst of the blood away, touching Victoria’s wrist in the process, and he brings his hand back to his lap but doesn’t glance away when he catches Victoria’s stare.

In the sound of waves sweeping into the shore, lazy seagulls croaking above the water, wind billowing the sharp, salty air around them, he isn’t embarrassed enough to glance away. She doesn’t either, and they look at each other like that, Nathan breathing steady now, soft and slow. He isn’t sure what to say. He doesn’t think he needs to say anything. But he wants to say something, do anything, to bridge the lingering space between them.

Victoria’s phone rings.

She picks up with her free hand and turns her head, chin tucking down as her brows come close together, and Nathan lets his gaze fall. “Hayden? Yeah. Right by the entrance. Wait, can you? Okay, yeah. See you.”

Nathan holds the tissue to his cut when the pressure of her hand eases. She stands, and Nathan wants to turn back just a few more seconds. But he catches something out of the ordinary to the side as she steps forward, and he frowns, certain he has seen that RV before.

Before he can say anything, Hayden’s brother’s car pulls up. In the front seat, adjusted just a few inches forward, is Hayden, sour-faced and dressed in wrinkled clothes.

“C’mon,” Victoria says.

Nathan opens the back door for her but she spreads her hand over his shoulder and eases him in first. She settles behind Hayden and shuts the door behind her. A lime mojito air freshener is dangling from the rear-view window but it smells like stale chips and guacamole inside.

“Dude, you two better have a—” 

Hayden is big enough to look like he belongs in that seat but with his eyes wide and mouth ajar like that he looks like a student driver encountering his first accident on the road.

“ _What?_ ” Nathan barks.

Hayden’s gaze flickers to Victoria. Nathan can’t see any expression out of the ordinary when he glances back at her, but Hayden settles back into his seat, moving it forward another few inches to let Victoria have more leg room. He pauses again, leaning forward, then says, “Check that out.”

Victoria cranes her head over too. The RV tucked further down the beach’s driveway makes no effort to blend in. Now that he’s really looking, Nathan thinks he can see a lawn chair in the shadows around the side. “…That’s an ugly fuckin’ hunk of metal,” Nathan mumbles.

“I think it belongs to Frank Bowers. My brother says he’s been dealing ever since he dropped out of Blackwell a couple of years ago.”

“Do people actually buy weed from this creep?” Victoria says, scrunching up her nose. Nathan thinks he sees something written on the outside of the grubby back window. He wonders what it’s even like inside an RV or a trailer – he isn’t really sure if there’s a difference – and then considers living without running water and shudders with revulsion.

“Uh, sometimes. But some kids at the high school – Blackwell, too – like, run drugs for him, apparently. But some of them just resell it without him knowing.”

“Wild shit,” Nathan says.

Hayden pulls out, one hand braced against the passenger seat’s headrest. Victoria buckles her seatbelt and, after an impatient hum, reaches over for Nathan’s. He flinches, not because he’s scared but because the idea of having her hands anywhere below his shoulders can’t be considered, especially now, and Victoria pauses for a second, catching his eye. He looks away at once but still sees her lips tighten at the corners.

Her voice is steady when she speaks a few moments later. “Hayden, you have that thing I mentioned?”

“Yeah.” Hayden passes back a water bottle. The car slows – Hayden looks more alert than Nathan thinks he has ever seen him – and doesn’t go back into its regular speed until Nathan seizes it and Hayden has both hands back on the wheel.

He presses it into his temple. The condensation builds and rolls down his cheek. It makes him feel like he’s crying without his entire body heaving like it usually does, and he feels himself sink deep inside his mind at that one detail, feeling absolutely disgusting for the first time since he called Victoria.

He should’ve kept quiet. He should’ve gone up to his room. He should’ve kept Victoria and Hayden out of the disaster of a life he entrenched himself in like a dog waiting for an owner that will never come home. He doesn’t know why his dad still gets to him so much. Nathan aged out of any of his constructive attention a long time ago. He should be old enough to know when someone actually cares or not.

He wishes he knew why that’s so hard for him.

“My parents are out,” Victoria says, gently. “You can stay over my place, if you want.”

Nathan stares at her, the casual set of her lips, her jaw, then glances at Hayden, but Hayden is already going on the main road by the sea, toward the condos in the south, and doesn’t even seem to notice him looking. Nathan swallows, throat dry, and nods, staring into his lap. “Yeah, I… Yeah,” he replies.

He wishes that they didn’t know that he wouldn’t refuse that offer from either of them, even if his face wasn’t busted.

But Victoria’s hand is between them, close to his knee. He wants to smooth his fingers over her knuckles. He kind of wants her to press her palm over his wrist first. He knows that she won’t, and he knows why she won’t, but it doesn’t stop him from thinking.

·

Victoria asks for a first aid kit from the bathroom while she gets the ice, and Hayden finds it easily. It’s an actual kit, green with a textured handle, and Nathan snorts and says something about how it isn’t that serious; it’s not like they’re sewing his eye back in.

Hayden makes a weird face and neither of them laugh.

They sit him down in the dining room which spills into the kitchen, warm-toned like the short expanse of the hallway Nathan saw coming in. Victoria raises her eyebrows when he says he doesn’t want gauze on the cut and Hayden jumps in with, “No, maybe it needs room to breathe?”

Once Nathan gets it clean, Hayden ebbs away, body facing away from Nathan but his dismayed stare locked helplessly on Nathan’s bruised skin. It’s more for his own comfort than mercy at Hayden’s uneasiness that Nathan makes eye contact. “I’m just gonna…” Hayden makes a weak gesture with his thumbs to the front door. Victoria and Nathan look at him with almost identical expressions, and he nods once, going back there at a pace that’s just a little too fast to be casual.

“Asshole,” Nathan says, managing a little grin. “Didn’t even offer shit from his stash.”

Victoria doesn’t smile, just stares at him with that look. Nathan blinks at her and tries glancing away but she’s everywhere, from the ice in his hands to the fading moisture on his cheek. It’s not easy holding her gaze, though. Victoria doesn’t wear pity well, but now she looks like she wants to say something and they both know she won’t, so they’re just waiting, hoping the walls between them will come down low enough for one of them to step over and cross the ground between them.

“Thank you,” he says, mostly because she never shies away from how fucked up it all is.

“Yeah,” she replies. She moves her hands to brush her bangs back. Her bangles jingle on her wrists. She pulls her hairband out and starts redoing her ponytail. “Taylor and Courtney are nobody I have to impress anyway.”

“The chicks from the orientation?”

“Yeah. They’re clingy. Kinda like…have you watched Mean Girls?”

“The one with that—that one chick?”

“From The Notebook?”

“The, uh, _I wrote you every day for a year_ movie?”

Her mouth rolls shut at his impression – more of him adopting a deep, gravelly voice than any real acting – but her eyes go pinched the way they do when she laughs. “Yeah. Those two are like the girls who follow around Rachel McAdams. If I go the Lohan route and high school ends with me winning prom queen – ugh, _gag_ – and giving away my crown, you have permission to shove me off the stage.”

“Shit, I’d be more worried about the fucking weight gain plot.”

“God, Nathan, I’m not stupid,” but she’s kind of laughing when she says it, finally breaking into a smile. She glances at his wound again, slowly drawing the inside of her lips between her teeth. Her lipstick is still intact when he speaks again. “…Does it still hurt?”

“I can manage.”

“I didn’t ask that. Does it hurt?”

“…Yeah. But, um, this,” and he flaps his free hand limply at the affected cheek, “isn’t, isn’t all, that I’m, uh…” The words seal up inside him. He takes a deep breath and holds it, counts to ten.

“You’ve got it,” Victoria murmurs in the same gentle tone of her humming to a song, maybe not even aware that she says it.

“When he—after, um, I… I…” This time he grinds the thought between his teeth until it crumbles back into nothing. The impossibility of telling Victoria about that split second of sympathy pins him down and renders him immobile.

Victoria’s eyes widen the tiniest fraction and her gaze flickers over him. Maybe she remembers that he hasn’t been limping or anything bad like that, and she settles again, composed in a way he’s always been jealous of.

She smooths her hand over his shoulder blade. Nathan looks up at her, her long blonde hair that never falls out of place, her lips that are never chapped, her eyes that never go red and distant, and he feels himself go weak. Even if he could reach out and touch her he doesn’t think he would. He doesn’t know how to preserve beautiful things. All he can do is watch, and the only images he knows he can frame forever are reflections of the aching decay in his own mind. He wants to smooth out every troubled look he has seen on her. He wants to breathe in her pain so it never reaches her blood.

He eases his balled hand on the dining table, intending to hide his tremors by rapping against the surface, but it’s so solid that it might be real marble embedded in the wood frame. A clear glass plate in the center of the table is decorated with three candles and a vase of flowers. Real. He pinches one of the red petals to make sure.

“No kill like overkill,” Victoria says, a half-smile cutting into her face.

“It, uh, looks nice.”

The walls are white with decorations across them in even, intentional intervals. Painted plates, a bronze clock, even more candles, and a framed magazine article titled _2009_ _Gallery of the Year: The Chase Space (Portland, Oregon)_. Nathan finds himself skimming through what he can see automatically, but he feels Victoria’s stare on him, and he presses his lips tight, lowering the ice bag.

“Are your parents in Portland?”

“Yeah. I think some bigshot is coming.” She frowns and rubs her thumb along one of her earrings. “I couldn’t find anything out.”

He wonders if he can ask her about Seattle, if she misses it like he misses Florida, if she ever wants to visit again. Nathan doesn’t know if he can do anything with his life, but he does want to go back to Fort Lauderdale one more time. One of these days, he’ll go on a road trip without telling anyone, exist around people who don’t know his name, buy expensive drinks in a hotel room, and sleep until four in the afternoon each day. For a second he thinks about telling Victoria his plan, but she mentioned interning and college a few times before, and where Nathan drowns himself in the past Victoria projects herself into the future. It’s one of the reasons why they shouldn’t get along. It’s among the greatest reasons he’s glad they do.

“I’m kind of beat,” Victoria says. She stands, bracing herself with one hand balanced against the wood of the table, and takes the first aid kit. It’s already closed, but she checks the locks over.

“Oh. I’ll—”

“You can sleep in my room,” she tells him. “I’ve got a couch. And besides, I don’t need the housekeeper seeing you and…spreading rumors or whatever.”

Ah.

He’s napped at Hayden’s house several times, but that was more like his insides being pleasantly warm with beer and his mind following suit on one of Hayden’s many bean bags or his trio of cats that one time. Compared to that, Victoria’s room is daunting.

He washes the ice bag and leaves it to dry in the empty dish rack. Victoria taps a cabinet over the sink when she comes back and tells him that’s where the hand towels are. Indeed, the ones hanging on the drawer handles are paper-like and woven with careful designs, more thread than actual fabric, probably.

“What the fuck,” he whispers.

“God, don’t even get me started,” Victoria replies. “I kid you not, the only reason we don’t have an indoor fountain is because they can’t find a small one they like.”

He follows her out into the narrow hallway and into what must be the living room. There’s an imprint in the wall that looks like it’s meant for an old round tube television. Instead, a tiny animal bed is tucked inside. There’s even a night lamp installed over it. “You have a cat?”

“A dog. He’s usually in Portland. Anne pays a sitter to keep him company when she and my dad are at work.” Victoria stops at her door. A movie poster of a woman with thick lashes and an even thicker grimace is at eye level. “I guess he doesn’t shed, so he’s okay. A little bouncy.”

Nathan imagines a small, yapping pup bounding around this space, then, when the reality of the tiny thing’s absence proves that image wrong, feels the stiff, almost intentional emptiness that resonates from every part of the apartment weigh on his skin.

Victoria opens her door. Her room is pretty clean, but the walls are bare white, her desk scattered with books, a calculator, a bag of cookies. He’s about to enter with her but she pauses just beyond the threshold and toes her shoes off. Nathan watches as she puts her Mary Janes on the mat that swells in this small bend of space – her closet or bathroom is probably right around the corner – and fumbles to mimic her.

Inside, he finds traces of Victoria in the photography books crammed into one shelf on her bookcase, her camera given half of another, the brushes stained with makeup on her vanity, the figurine still in its box by her laptop, the framed photo of a brown-skinned woman who has Victoria’s smile on the bedside table.

“Not as big as yours, but…” Victoria peels a blanket from her untucked bed and throws it over the back of the couch. Flecks of sunlight scatter across it. Nathan glances away from the photo when she turns back to him but he sees her expression shift in his peripheral vision. “Oh. You noticed that?”

“…Yeah.”

Victoria’s expression is guarded, made unreadable as she does so well. She reaches for the bedside table and gently starts pressing the frame down, then pauses, brows furrowing. “Does she look like me?”

“You have the same eyes.” Brown, hooded, little flecks of black in the irises. It’s impossible to look at her and not realize she’s Victoria’s mom.

“Hers were a little darker,” Victoria says. She moves to her bed and sits, reaching for the frame smoothly in the same movement. Nathan’s throat feels tight for a second, and after a few seconds he goes to sit beside her, one hand holding onto his knee that threatens to tremor, the other bare in the expanse of space between them. Up close, he can see so much more of Victoria in her mom: the smooth jaw, high cheekbones, dimples right at the corners of her mouth. Even the same shape of glasses that Victoria has phased out for contacts. Victoria presses her thumb over her mom’s eyes, purses her lips, and finally lays the frame on her lap, running her hands through her ponytail. “This is going to sound lame, but…”

She doesn’t continue for a long moment. Nathan swallows and repeats, “But?”

“I used to – ugh, it’s so stupid, I know, but I used to think that maybe my dad and Anne pretty much avoid me because I look like her. I didn’t even meet my dad until my mom was sick. I know, real fucking dumb, right?” She says, nodding to Nathan’s expressionless face. Victoria gingerly takes the frame and eases it face down on her bedside table. “It was only for a little while though. And I mean, the gallery really started picking up around the time I moved in.” She shrugs, and Nathan feels his lips part at the movement, so forceful coming from her. “Whatever. It’s not like I was a kid when she died, anyway.”

 _You were only ten_ , Nathan thinks. “That’s not dumb at all,” he says instead.

Victoria’s stare lingers at her hands, clasped tight in her lap, for a moment. When she looks up at him her face is smoothed out into a calm, unaffected expression. “I’m going to take my makeup off. You wanna rest?”

“Yeah,” Nathan says, because he’s tired, and a part of him is a little afraid of hearing her cry in the bathroom and not knowing how to help her.

The sink runs for a long time. The only sound over the deafening rush of water is the dry scratch of his hair against the pillow beneath him. The back of the couch is sturdy, unyielding, and Nathan presses his cheek into it trying not to think at all.

·

He wakes up gasping, sweat dripping down his temples. He stares, unblinking, at the ceiling muddied by shadows, his tongue sitting like sand at the back of his mouth. His first coherent thought is how cliché this must look – he usually wakes up without making a scene after a shapeless nightmare – and he goes limb with embarrassment, hands over his face.

“Nathan.”

He wills himself to stare at her from between his fingers. Victoria’s hair is a bit wavy halfway down, messy on one side where she must’ve been sleeping. In the dark, her eyes are softer, gentler. Her cheeks are flushed.

“Hey.” She presses her hand to his shoulder. The fabric of his shirt sticks to his clammy skin. His clothes from yesterday feel like greasy rags. Her gaze flickers, like she’s thinking about doing or saying something but decided not to, and Nathan tries swallowing. His sinuses sting at the attempt. “You okay?” she asks, squatting by his side.

Nathan remembers that he didn’t brush his teeth. He licks contemplatively at one incisor with his mouth closed, then nods.

“…Does that happen a lot?”

“…Not…” He turns his head to cough. “No. Just sometimes.”

“Okay.” Her hand is still there. He can’t look at it without being too obvious but it fills up everything except his vision. The back of his nose hurts but his head is quiet now, still. Her thumb rolls gently across the skin of his collar. “…Do you want to sleep in my bed?”

“Ah—” He swallows again, this time successfully. “I’m not—I mean, you’re not sleeping _here_ ,” he says, patting the side of the cushion beneath him.

“No, I mean, like, we sleep on different sides.” She tilts her chin toward the bed. “There’s enough room.”

He stares at her. “…Are you sure…?”

“I trust you, Nathan.”

Her bed’s big enough that they can lie back to back without touching. Nathan’s a little relieved that she didn’t shove a pillow in the gap between them as a barrier but his body is stiff and compacted on the edge, the outline of the couch sharp in his vision in spite of the dark. He can’t hear Victoria breathing on the other side, and he has to take a moment to quell the rising swell of irrational panic. He doesn’t think he can roll over to look at her. He doesn’t want to try.

Dirt lingers on his skin, under the surface, seeping past fat and muscle. He swallows, throat clicking. He needs to go back to the manor tomorrow. It’s not like he can just go from Victoria’s to Hayden’s every night. His dad will end up getting impatient, and Nathan will be treading on gasoline with matches wedged between his fingers. For a moment, the thought of seeing his mom again feels like an even bigger challenge. All this time he assumed she had a clue, but he never thought she knew. But she did. Kris probably did too, watched him become an effigy at the stake and was glad it wasn’t her. He can’t blame her. During her fall from grace he felt the same way.

Still, Victoria is bare-faced and half-asleep beside him, and there’s no pillow between them. They’re not even using different blankets. Maybe other boys would be excited. Nathan feels sick. If he starts talking to himself or rocking really bad, there’s no hiding it. Even worse, were he to roll over and fill up that space between them, they can never go back to this. He can’t ruin this for them. He can’t ruin this for himself.

So he lays there, watching the couch, the trees swinging gently beyond the window. Their shadows splay across Nathan’s face and he flutters his eyes shut at that, his breath going soft in his chest. “Victoria,” he says.

“Mm?”

“I messed up. I shouldn’t have said that shit to you earlier.”

The words linger above them. Nathan feels himself start to succumb to exhaustion before Victoria says, “I know you didn’t mean it.” A few seconds, then, “I’m…glad you brought it up.”

“It was still fucked up, though. I fucked up.”

“I mean, I get it.” He waits for her to speak again. Then, “I really looked up to her too. But I’m…ah.”  She shifts, the springs gently creaking under her weight. Nathan keeps still. “People come and people go. And if you can help it, sometimes you have to decide whether they get to have a place where you belong.” Her breath hitches, then she sighs. “Not to say ‘you’ means _you_.”

“Yeah.” And maybe she has a room where she found space for him. His heart beats hard in his chest. He takes even breaths, willing himself to stop being so intense. His dad told him that he’s selfish, always has to have someone’s attention, always, and Nathan digs for whatever he can find within himself to be human-shaped beside her. “I really think about it, sometimes. Just going off like she did someday.”

“Where would you go?”

“Florida. Far away from Arcadia fucking Bay.  You?”

“Back to Seattle. Back home.”

“…That sounds nice.”

She is silent for a long while. Then, she says, “…Yeah.”

·

Nathan ends up getting his own car as an early gift for his fifteenth birthday. It’s not new. A few years old, actually. It only has two doors, the top doesn’t go down, and he thinks that keeping the black paint job clean is going to be a nightmare even if the model looks cooler that way.

His dad mentions something about him behaving himself, but what Nathan really hears is him later, on the phone, talking to some police officer whose name Nathan heard here and there, warning him and the others to keep their distance from the Prescott family. He feels like it’s a familiar conversation. Maybe it is. He wasn’t doing anything _that_ questionable while Kristine was home, outside of drinking and messing around. Still, he’s not dumb enough to sneak pot in his new glove compartment when he doesn’t even have a license.

His mom looks at his cut once, and a strange emotion ripples across her gaze, but she doesn’t say anything about it. Nathan doesn’t see his dad for a week after he hits him, but he isn’t looking for him either. The normalcy constructed around them picks at the scab and Nathan is left with a whitish scar on his forehead. He’s pale enough that he sometimes doesn’t catch it in the mirror, and the hair of his eyebrows have a little gap just past the peak of his brow bone anyway.

Victoria doesn’t get in trouble for having him over for the night, maybe because Nathan slipped the woman from the cleaning agency a hundred-dollar bill when she saw him leaving, clothes wrinkled and hair fluttering out in every direction.

It goes on. Nathan eyes the door to his dad’s study, his mom’s craft room when he emerges from the cove of his bedroom each afternoon, not sure if they ever talk about it. Dinner together is drenched in silence where cursory questions once lingered, conversations that Kristine tried included him in before. But she’s gone, and Nathan learns to breathe and eat and sleep without her weighing on his mind. 

He sneaks off with Hayden and Victoria one night when his dad isn’t around. His parents mention signing him up for driver’s school and when Hayden breathes a long, low swear as he drives Nathan’s car down the manor’s hill, peaking in a raptor-like screech as the elevation evens out but the car keeps going, Nathan thinks that nothing can compare to learning like this.

They go around the beach’s parking lot, the same way Hayden’s oldest brother taught him, and Victoria actually grabs the roof handle at one point, back crushed against the passenger seat, looking at Nathan like he’s genuinely trying to kill her. Hayden brings some weed but they don’t light up. The taste of the sunrise fills their mouths they drive down the road by the beach, windows down, radio on, laughing at how Victoria had to slide the seat all the way forward on her turn, the way Hayden gravely warned them of small objects a few hundred feet away, the moment Nathan finally, loudly, threw in the towel after his seventh failed attempt at parallel parking with no cars in front of or behind him.

It’s deathly lows and shaky midways with Nathan’s head, but sometimes, like snow drafts in September and his father’s affection, moments come that can’t be captured and kept, only remembered as it happens.

They sit Nathan’s camera on the dashboard and lean up into the front seat, their faces drenched by sunlight on the horizon.

Victoria grimaces at the picture and says they look terrible, but Nathan keeps it anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is pretty self-indulgent, but I love it when writers have extended author's notes, so [here](https://grey-amethyst.tumblr.com/post/163241341172/the-company-i-keep-notes) are mine because I can't write short things in general.


	3. “Don’t ever embarrass me like that again.”

·

**Chapter 3: “Don’t ever embarrass me like that again.”**

·

> **_Freshman year!!_ **
> 
> _To: **Nathan Prescott**_
> 
> _From: **Kristine Prescott**_
> 
> _Hello little brother!_
> 
> _I know it’s been a while. Dad told me you moved into the dorms last week, and I wanted to make sure you’re settling in. I’m proud of you for making it to Blackwell and I’m sure you’ll find better use of it than I did. Being in the Vortex Club netted me some great memories and even better friends, but just remember they’re a bunch of kids like you who’re away from home for the first time. I want to write “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do” but you and I know both know that’s a loose standard! :x Promise you won’t do anything that might sneak up on you later, okay?_
> 
> _If things end up getting tough, high school is only four years. I honestly barely remember back when mother and father were disappointed about the whole drinking with a girl after curfew thing…although that might be because of how mad they were my first year of college. And at least they support your photography. Mom keeps asking about my job prospects as a psych major (didn’t she major in English lit?)_
> 
> _Anyway, I’m really glad you messaged me. I can’t blame you for being upset. A big part of me is ashamed of how I left too. But Nate, you know what it’s like with Mom and Dad. And I know you’re strong enough to handle them._
> 
> _My girlfriend says she wants to meet you, but I don’t think we can make this winter break. Maybe the summer? I know I’m still the queen of avoidance, but I swear we’ve had those plans for a while._
> 
> _Always remember your sister cares about you a whole lot._
> 
> _Best wishes,_
> 
> _Your big sis, Kris_

·

Moths flock around the lamps, dim and hazy in the humid air. Nathan takes a picture, pockets his phone, and pulls his lighter out with restless fingers. The underclassmen dorms show their age, but the hill its five stories tower over has a wide view of the woods to the north.

On another sleepless night, he’d be roaming aimlessly. The campus police have learned not to bother him by now, and he’s been bold enough to smoke a joint only two or three times. He’s also been out until the sunrise before, watching rabbits poke their noses out of bushes and trying not to think about the carcasses he seeks out when his head is in a bad space, but tonight his body is still heavy and stiff from Friday’s party.

It comes to him in flashes, then clears around the time he jolted awake to find himself curled in the backseat of his own car with Hayden at the wheel and Victoria on her phone, absently stroking her thumb over his shoulder. He squinted up into the darkness, heart racing and breath ragged. He told them – didn’t ask, he remembers that much between the holes in his memory – that he wasn’t going to a hospital, his dad isn’t finding out, he’d rather die on the side of the road, until Hayden pulled over and said “We’re heading to the dorms, bro, we wouldn’t do that shit to you.”

Nathan’s scar pulsed. He closed his eyes and tried not to look ashamed.

He billows out cigarette smoke in slow waves. He has to go back to the manor in the afternoon, push his food around and try not to look hungover or high. He had just three drinks yesterday, which is conservative for a Saturday, all things considered, so it won’t be as hard. His dad hasn’t lifted his hand to Nathan since the summer either. Nathan thinks it might be because he’s easier to tolerate at a distance.

When he hears his name called he almost ignores it, but the voice is dimly familiar and drives tension up his jaw. He looks up across the hill to find Colin Everett, the senior who caught Nathan in the short minute he was alone at the party and dragged him, locked in the bend of his arm hooked over his shoulder, to his other senior friends and introduced him as Kris’s brother. His hair is messy in a way that appears more harmless than his grin implies.

Nathan’s hand comes up to his cigarette, fingers shaking, but he smiles because this time Colin called him by his name.

“Hey,” Nathan says, and Colin, true to his infinite ability to impress and annoy everyone around him, plucks away Nathan’s cigarette and takes a drag. Nathan blinks, watches Colin’s muddy brown eyes flutter shut as he inhales for far longer than anyone could pass as normal, and carefully tells himself that picking a fight isn’t worth it when Colin is six feet tall and Nathan can smell the booze on him over his drugstore cologne. Still, he can’t help but say, “Dude, the fuck?”

“My bad.” Colin smirks. “It just felt right, y’know?”

Then he makes this face edged with something Nathan doesn’t want to look at. He lights himself a new cigarette, mostly to keep himself from asking what Colin’s doing leaving the underclassmen dorms at night.

“That shit on Friday hit you fucking hard, right? For a second I thought you were going to be on the first ambulance ride of the year.”

“No, I—I could handle it.”

“I knew you could.” And the grin he gives Nathan is a little better. None of the lewdness seconds earlier or the smugness back when his friends said Nathan looked familiar, had his sister’s eyes. More of that almost proud look when Nathan, thinking he could finally live outside Kris’s shadow if he did this one thing she would never do, rolled up a hundred-dollar bill and snorted his first line.

Colin splays his phone in Nathan’s vision, asking if he can post a video. It follows everything else Nathan has watched on Blackwell’s social media, fearing something might get back to his dad, and this one has him in the frame for a record of three seconds, balancing a pipe between his knees next to a handsy girl whose name Nathan can’t remember, before shifting to the latest development in the drunken two-hour game of UNO that overshadowed the spectacle of Kristine Prescott’s twitchy kid brother by far.

Nathan says it’s fine. His hand trembles when he knocks the ash off his cigarette, and then Colin smiles at him, gently. Knowingly.

Nathan returns inside with a lighter wallet and a baggie of coke. The dorm’s stairwells are old like the rest of the building, its steps bowed with decades of students before him, but he still climbs them two at a time. His room is on the fifth floor, and the elevator is too tight for the low static in his head.

He emerges into his floor’s western hallway, starkly dark and long, the carpet seamless beneath him and the wooden doors almost perfectly parallel on either side. He stares at the florescent light flickering in the far corner, where his medical single is. Nathan instinctively itches for his camera, but the last thing he needs is some human-shaped shadow in the corner of the screen to ruin an already sleepless night.

He sighs and starts down the hall, then the light sputters and goes dead.

“Fuck.”

He pauses, mid-step, and rolls his eyes, scuffing his shoe on the floor.

Then the echoes of a metallic crash ricochet into the hallway.

Nathan absolutely does not scream but somehow finds himself on the ground, propped up on a sore, tingling elbow. He swears, scrambles upright, pats himself down, and checks the carpet for anything he might’ve dropped. He hears someone groan awake in an adjacent room. A little way down the hall, another guy hisses “ _Shit_ ,” and presumably starts picking everything up. It clicks when Nathan hears water start running: the communal kitchen.

Some kid with a black, overgrown undercut and glasses is bowed over the sink, sleeves rolled up above his soapy elbows. If he was as thin as Nathan, he’d have an instant target on his back.

Nathan knows how it goes: Hayden always stands back, mouth pulled tight in a frown, when someone gets picked on, but Logan, one of Hayden’s junior varsity football friends bearing the remarkable feat of having both the appearance and personality of a brick, elbows outcasts and annoyances into walls and furniture like he’s auditioning as an extra on Glee. Nathan recorded Zachary, another one of Hayden’s teammates and one of very few people who can explain what’s going on in biology class to Nathan, even if he made Nathan promise not to tell he got in with a science application, pushing some loser in a locker mostly because he couldn’t believe that was actually something that happens in real life. He played the video for Victoria later over the wine coolers she and Taylor hid in their shared dorm room and they both laughed so hard they couldn’t breathe.

The memory steadies him, makes everything in his head go solid and less furious, but he’s still at the doorway when the kid turns around, shaking excess water off his arms. He jumps, and Nathan reflexively flinches.

“Oh my god,” the kid says. He straightens his glasses with his clean wrists. Nathan catches his dark, deep-set eyes and full lips, recognizing him from his art theory class. “Nathan, you—” He pauses, licks his lips, glances at the clock over Nathan’s head, and continues in a whisper, “What are you doing up at three in the morning?”

Maybe he should feel bad about not remembering this guy’s name. Nathan frowns, shoving his hands back into his sweater’s pockets, and his fingers clasp around the baggie again. Nathan felt just a flash of invincibility when he bought it, thinking that even if he was being set up, his family name is still on the upperclassmen dorm Colin lives in. Nathan asked if he was reselling from Frank Bowers, and Colin pat him on the arm, laughed, and said Nathan was better off buying from him. Frank draws the line at selling to freshmen, apparently.

He looks at this kid, and he’s got the tragic atmosphere of a nerd gone hipster trying very hard to look like he didn’t put much thought into his look. If Nathan wasn’t also in a sweater and skinny jeans with his hair still gelled down after midnight, he would’ve shot out an insult. Instead, Nathan jerks his chin to the doorway behind him and tells the truth. “Went out for a smoke and now it looks like a creepy-ass Stephen King story out there.”

The kid raises his eyebrows, then breathes out a laugh. “Right? Here,” and he goes for the dining room table. Nathan notices now the tray there, covered in aluminum foil, the measuring pot and steel bowl, still wet, the smell of warm chocolate, and one of their class textbooks strewn next to a notebook with densely packed writing. The kid seizes his camera, an older model of Nathan’s own, and turns it on. After a few button presses, he offers it to Nathan. “I took a few shots.”

Nathan unfurls his fist, leaving his baggie at rest in his pocket, and gingerly takes the camera.

On the viewfinder is the hallway, Nathan’s door at the very end, illuminated by a burst of florescent light maybe milliseconds after the overhead bulb flickered on. The walls on either end are aligned almost perfectly parallel on either side of the frame, and the closest room slates, the only ones the viewer might be able to read, are wiped blank. Aligned with the desaturated effect, Nathan recognizes the style as Evan Harris’s, intentional and intense, if a little predictable as a result. Nonetheless, he smirks at the screen before handing it back. “You sure you didn’t just pull a still from The Shining?”

“Absolutely not. I respect Stanley Kubrick’s work – and the homage to Diane Arbus with the twins was iconic, I won’t deny that – but his methodology leaves a lot to be desired.”

He also forgot that Evan seems to think he’s a decade into his career as an art critic.

“It’s a good movie on its own,” Nathan says. He can’t really remember when he watched it the first time, but he does remember stumbling on the novel in his dad’s bookshelf when he was seven. His mom found like that hours later, sitting on the floor with it splayed open on his lap, more fascinated than scared at what he could understand. “The book told a better horror story.”

Evan has this look on his face, somehow both impressed and skeptical, as he shuts off his camera. “Weird. You never struck me as the bookish type.”

“Fuck, okay Evan. Is it the twitching that threw you off or the verbal tics?”

Nathan busies himself with smoothing out wrinkles in his sweater when Evan goes pink and pushes his glasses up his nose. He didn’t mean to say it like that, all that bitterness and venom spewing into something embarrassing like always.

“…I didn’t—I didn’t mean it like that.”

He’s startled into glancing back up to catch Evan’s expression. Evan is staring down at his camera, brow troubled, lips pursed. Nathan finds himself thinking that his half-amused arrogance looks better on him, especially with that smile, then frowns, wondering why he’d even consider that in the first place.

Evan continues, “I mean, with you being in the Vortex Club and all, and your sister never mentioned—”

“My sister?” Evan looks up at him, and then it clicks. Evan _Harris_. Nathan gapes at him for a second, wondering how the hell did he never catch that, and he says, “What the fuck, you don’t look anything like your sister.”

“We were adopted,” Evan replies. “Melissa’s Thai. I think I’m Chinese, maybe half-Viet.”

“Oh. …Shit, sorry, my bad.”

And then Evan tilts his head, narrows his eyes and looks at Nathan like he’s not sure if he’s joking. “For what?” he asks, and the confirmation Nathan expects for the welling _you fucked up **you** **fucked up** _ mantra in his head never comes.

Nathan shrugs and looks away. “Fuckin’—I dunno.”

“Well, I’m not in the right place to judge. What I said to you earlier was hubristic. …You know what that means, right?”

“Gee, Evan, it’s almost like we take the same English course,” Nathan says, raising an eyebrow. “Fucking _enlighten_ me to this new vocabulary.”

Evan laughs, and it’s a nice one, the way his eyes pinch and his nose scrunches up. Nathan watches, and this time he doesn’t look away, even finds himself smiling, and the cloying inevitability of being defined by his sister’s shadow starts to pale. For a second he feels further from it than he did with the bitter, chemical smell that hung in his aching sinuses after the high wore off at the party, and he tries thinking of something to say, anything.

The stairwell door down the hall clicks unlocked and creaks open. Nathan backs closer to the door, expecting that person to pass the kitchen, and almost jumps when they end up rocking into the room and past him without a glance.

Rachel Amber’s ears are bare, her oversized shirt is soaked down the back, and she leaves behind the smell of booze and strawberry shampoo in almost equal waves.

“Sorry I took so long,” she tells Evan, grasping his shoulder as she goes around him. He reaches out under her arms as if to steady her, but she draws back, grinning dimly at him.

Just before the first Vortex Club meeting, Rachel had a tall, sour-faced girl lagging sullenly behind her as she talked to a couple of seniors; the only reason Nathan noticed either of them was because Victoria whispered _can you believe this sad little lesbian following around that slut like a fucking dog?_ with cruel delight, and until the party he assumed that girl would always be attached to Rachel. Evan doesn’t reach out again, just angles himself toward her a bit and keeps their distance, and Nathan wonders if the girl’s absence at the party was because of her or Rachel.

“What kind of shower takes an hour?” Evan says incredulously, but his face splits open with warmth. “Obviously, you didn’t take the time to brush your teeth.”

“Rude,” she laughs, pushing at him. He stumbles back but they’re still beaming at each other. Rachel reaches for the tray on the table and peels back the foil. “Oh, you’re an angel. You literally might be only guy on this campus to know how to bake.”

“Yeah, I know.” Evan’s gaze flickers from Rachel’s hair, hanging dangerously close to the brownies, to Nathan, fixed by the wall. “Nathan, do you want any?”

Rachel gasps and lifts her head. Her shirt is drooping down one shoulder. The grooves of her collarbones look they can hold entire rolls of quarters. A thumb-shaped bruise is spreading on her neck like a blood clot dispersing in hot water.

“Nathan!” She has the kind of smile that a person can see once and know instantly that it is pretty from every angle. Her gaze is steady and warm. “Hang out with us! We, like, don’t have any classes together, and I didn’t even get to talk to you at the last Vortex Club party.”

During the party, Nathan, glancing away from Colin cutting him a slug-like line, saw her flanked by two guys as she left the VIP section with leaden legs. The fibers of her feather earring stuck to her sweat-shiny cheeks. Her hair fluttered as one guy leaned in to whisper something, and she laughed, silent under the throbbing bass.

Evan scoffs and mutters about how maybe the Vortex Club has a few decent people but he heard some rumors and their seniors give him a bad vibe anyway.

Nathan bites the inside of his cheek and ignores the shift in Rachel’s expression in case it’s her remembering that split second their eyes met right before the curtains lining the VIP section’s perimeter swallowed her and her reaction whole.

“No,” he says, “I was about to sleep anyway.”

He tries not to focus on how silence follows him all the way down that hallway and its walls that lean in and close around him until he unlocks his door.

He remembers Colin leaving the dorm at night.

Nathan hides the baggie under a winter sweater and takes a few long pulls from the liquor in his fridge until he can’t stay upright, then topples into his bed, waiting to not think at all.

·

The night before the first move-in day for spring semester, Nathan gets a text while he has half a pill of ecstasy in his damp fist. He pulls out his phone and takes longer than usual to focus enough to read what it says, and by the time he gets the name, the preview fades, and he’s left staring at a sweaty, pale kid in his screen’s reflection.

Usually the others joke and comment when someone taps out, especially the upperclassmen, but between the first deadlines of senior project submissions and everything the last Vortex Club party of the winter break has to offer, none of them notice when he abandons the crumbling half next to his other.

He hates needing a day to recoup after taking that shit, anyway.

Outside the gym, he squints at Victoria’s message.

_I just parked.  
Are you awake?_

He smashes his fingers against the screen as he makes his way to the dorms. She’s able to decipher it, as she always manages to do, and he smiles, shaky against the dry, late winter breeze.

He passes by a group of juniors, zonked out in the grass. They wave at him, tell him to walk it off, and it sounds like the funniest thing in the world. He recognizes them from the groups of older Vortex Club members that actually talk to him around campus or the background of laughter whenever he’s on something, tagging a wall with a roast he came up himself or breaking out some alternate party supplies.

Having that kind of attention on him used to make him feel so small and stupid, but Hayden said he’s a riot when he’s drunk, and he only doubts it now when sobriety starts breaking through the shutters. Maybe some of it is true. Blackwell didn’t have a firework ban before Nathan, but it does now.

By the time he’s up the hill and swiping into the building, he’s steadier on his feet. The light on his floor cuts into him like a burst of lightning. Victoria, waiting by his door, looks him up and down and rolls her eyes, more exasperated than annoyed, in the sparse space between her cashmere hat and oversized silk scarf.

If they were different people, they’d hug outside his door and ask how each other’s winter vacation went.

Nathan opens his door for her and they enter the cool, dark cove of his room together.

“God, you look fucking out of it.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he says, grinning dimly. “I thought you were gonna drive in tomorrow morning.”

“I was, but Anne was asking if I wanted my dad and her to drive me, like they gave me a car for decoration or something.”

“I feel you.”

He kicks off his shoes and shuffles off his coat, draping it over his desk chair. Nathan’s sluggish gaze lingers on his desk, scattered with chemistry assignments boasting red ink over his many incorrect answers. His dad made him take that winter session course to complete his first-year science requirements, said that maybe a winter away from home would be enough encouragement for him to be less mediocre. To show he can do more than barely pass.

A Vortex Club party fell on the same night fall semester grades were posted. Nathan hid in a bathroom stall to check them on his phone, did a line, as custom when he needed to wire the static in his head in a way that was a little kinder, and went to the back of the rented warehouse and smoked the blunt Victoria offered and then two cigarettes at a time when that didn’t make him settle.

He saw it coming, but the worst part was that he knew his dad wasn’t going to be disappointed; instead, Nathan would be on trial for every decision he made at Blackwell when they both know his grades, at their core, are just a reflection of a boy who isn’t as smart or as motivated as any of his peers or family members.

All he could think about was what he could do to make sure Kris could visit over the summer like she said she might.

Victoria glides into his vision, hand falling on the desk where his have curled along the edge. “…You all right?”

“I’m fine,” he says automatically. He turns his head, cuts the corner of his mouth up trying to make it convincing, and then he sees.

“Took you long enough.” Victoria stands there with her jacket and hat held to her front, grin so wide her eyes are pulled narrow, plum-colored lips pressed together tight the way she does when she’s excited for a new episode of one of her shows no one knows she watches. She frees one hand to run along her bare neck. Her bangs are still styled across her forehead, but her hair is just barely longer than Nathan’s; across the back and at the base of her neck it’s even shorter, growing naturally around her face and jaw, so unlike the long ponytails he has seen for as long as he’s known her.

 “Holy _shit_.” And he laughs, and her smile breaks into open giggles. “Fuckin’…how’d you get away with that?”

“I got it done right before I left.” She shakes her hand through her hair, tossing her bangs. “You’re the first person I showed.”

It’s enough to soften everything these past few months: his dad’s distance, messages that his sister takes days, sometimes weeks to reply to, Rachel Amber giving him these almost sad grins across the VIP section, pretending not to notice Evan Harris looking to catch his gaze whenever he’s not with his friends on campus. Nathan smiles at her, and half of him wants to show how much it counts, her wanting him to know.

(A small, desperate part of him wanted very badly for her to just _tell_ him. Wanted her to care enough to trust him with what he always knew about her, deep down, even if the truth meant she couldn’t want him back even if she found a reason to.

And he’s still not sure whether needing to hear it from her back then was for her freedom or his.)

“You look gorgeous,” he says, equal parts fondness and fear trembling through him.

“Really?” She broadens the distance between them and checks herself in the mirror over his dresser, tracing her brows for nonexistent smudges. He watches her, the way her stare flits about her reflection. A muscle trembles in her cheek. She bites the inside of her lip and drops her hands to the top of his dresser, making his pill bottles rattle. “I mean, I still look good, right, not like a dyke?”

Her expression is blank in the mirror. He blinks fast, seeing her hands go still, her arms tense. “…You’re still pretty.”

Her face doesn’t change. He watches her stare settle in the mirror. Her shoulders heave with a long exhale. 

Nathan’s mouth twitches. “Do, uh, do you want a bowl? I got some good shit, tried it out earlier, and—”

“Yeah,” Victoria says, softly. “I…” Clearing her throat, she comes back to life before him, and the girl in the mirror leaves, and outside of it she is all crisp voice and warm eyes and rosy cheeks. “Yeah, hook me up.”

They sit across his bed, legs dangling off the edge, staring up at the clean blanket Nathan pinned around the sprinkler like Hayden taught him, passing the spoon wordlessly until Victoria’s face and eyes go red like they always do when she’s high and Nathan leans back against the wall, fighting off sleep.

They talk about the classes they’re going to take and who they’re taking them with, share small, harmless stories from the winter break, and laugh between jabs at classmates that are awkward or fashion-blind or just too ugly to ignore. She rolls her eyes when she notices the new addition to his wall, a framed photo of a nude woman sitting on a forest log. He thinks he got it while shopping drunk, because when he really thinks about it he feels grossed out since he’s pretty sure that’s a real log the model has her thighs around, and he’s never compelled to look at it when he’s got his belt and zipper undone.

He decides neither to defend himself nor mention the companion piece of an equally naked man crouched down in a river bed that ended up in the same shipping box. No one even suspects he’s the one who snuck it in one of the sophomore’s rooms, and he’s set on staying away from the adult-rated prank war that started.

The afternoon wears on. Nathan catches yawns in his elbows and shares a Red Bull with Victoria because he doesn’t want to lose a second of this moment.

Victoria’s hair is deeply gold down to the roots, even brighter when he has to turn on his desk lamp. Her lipstick keeps wearing off on the pipe and after Nathan starts grumbling about how the glass is going to be a bitch to clean she scoffs and says she’s not taking it off so he’d better get a napkin instead of smudging it all over his fingers and wrists like that.

Nathan feels weird, glances down at his arms where he has pushed his sleeves up, but the smudges are more fuchsia where he’s rubbed at them, nothing that looks like a cut or even a bruise.

Victoria mentions, a little louder than her sedated hum, enough for Nathan to look away and almost miss how she holds the insides of her elbows and nibbles at her lip, that she submitted her photography concentration and her advisor, their photography teacher who openly shares stories about her efforts in adopting a child, mentioned that only a handful of the first-years have even expressed an interest. “You know what? I think we’re the only ones who, like, pass in most freestyle assignments as photos,” she says.

Through the nervous haze, Nathan knows that can’t be right, but he has to think for a while before he remembers. “Evan Harris.”

“Oh, yeah.”

He told her about him and Melissa after he found out. Victoria laughed a little, raised her eyebrows and said _that guy?_ like she thought he was telling a joke, and he knew twofold that he couldn’t tell her about the dawning realization that something in him went soft when Evan smiled, kind of like how his heart flutters whenever the light scatters across Victoria’s eyes in just the right way.

Evan Harris can hold his own, anyway. Nathan has never seen him at a Vortex Club party, but the way he responds to insults and jabs, all level-headed and unimpressed and surprisingly creative, makes Nathan think that he could navigate his way to the VIP section if he wasn’t so bitter about them messing around and having fun.

“You know what?” Victoria says, leaning in as if to tell a secret.           

He grins. “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“No, no,” she said, waving an arm limply in his direction. He elbows her away with a chuckle. “You know what I heard? I heard that he’s totally gay. Like, he had a fucking boyfriend in middle school and everything.”

“That’s pretty gay,” Nathan says, but it gets him thinking.

Colin laughed at him once for telling a girl she had the wrong guy when he felt her hands pull on his hips. He doesn’t return the playful, sometimes urging touches he gets from a few girls at Vortex Club parties even when he’s drunk, but as far as he knows none of those kinds of rumors have been spreading about him, although sometimes he wonders why he never gets a hint of an urge to flirt back.

A thought occurs to him. “Wait. But I keep seeing him with that one chick, Rachel Amber.”

Victoria’s brow furrows, but only for a second. She leans in, a half-grin on her face. “That doesn’t mean anything. You know what I heard about _her_?” He nods expectantly. “I heard that she got kept back because she spent all her time last year doing hard drugs and partying. Even—” Victoria leans her fist against her arm and, not noticing Nathan’s cringe, mimes using a syringe. “Like, she’s a straight up _addict_. So, like, during her real first year she would get totally fucked up at parties and just, like, sleep with whatever guy got to her first.”

Nathan remembers Rachel, bruised and reeking of booze, leaning over a brownie tray and looking at him like it mattered that she finally got to talk to him. His shoulder twitches in a half-hearted shrug. “It’s probably just a rumor.”

“But she has to be a total slut, right?”

And the way Victoria looks at him, like she needs him to agree with her, isn’t what he expects. He knows what he should say. But he thinks about the older guys in the Vortex Club clapping him on the back when he does something stupid, laughing at his jokes, treating him like he’s more than some bratty kid with a last name that’s only important in a sluggish, decaying town. He remembers seeing them eying Rachel Amber up and down as she downed one shot after another and him looking away and into a world that’s easier for him to understand.

Nathan looks down at his empty hands and splays his palms apart in another little shrug. “People in this town’ll say anything.”

When he glances back, Victoria’s lips, worn pink near her mouth where she has stained his spoon, part. She looks like she is going to say something. She doesn’t, and she shifts her weight back slowly, rolling the pipe in her hands. “Yeah, I guess.”

·

> **_Summer_ **
> 
> _To: **Nathan Prescott**_
> 
> _From: **Kristine Prescott**_
> 
> _Hey Nate,_
> 
> _I just got off the phone with Dad, and I totally get why you’re angry. I should’ve told you on Skype instead of with an email. But I swear it’s just one summer, and we’ve got a ton of those. My schedule is more open this coming winter and summer, so I promise I can come during one of those months, okay? Don’t worry about your friends being out of state, either. Flip phones were still a thing during my freshman year – you have plenty more opportunities to keep in touch with them!_
> 
> _In all seriousness, I know things have been tough. Believe me when I say I know exactly what you’re going through. All that stress gets to you after a while. Keep taking your medication, and if what you told me about keeps happening, know that you can tell your doctor or even one of your friends if you need to._
> 
> _I think about you a lot, little brother. Please don’t stop writing me, and call whenever you’re ready._
> 
> _All the best,_
> 
> _Kris_
> 
> _P.S. Dad mentioned he got Mark Jefferson to sign on for a full-time position next year! I don’t know if you’ve met him, but he’s definitely someone to look out for if you’re looking for career opportunities. (Gross, now I sound like Mom.)_

·

The summer comes to an end in Dr. Cohen’s office, Nathan sitting beside his father on the couch facing the desk, fingers catching at the quilt dangling down its back. Dr. Cohen’s wife knits one for each of his patients; Nathan’s is his favorite color, a deep blue, chosen when he was ten and handling his first diagnosis.

Nathan stares at his therapist and tries to summon anger from inside himself. Sparks of it split into the air and catch on his skin and the back of his tongue, sending waves along the currents to everyone who brought him here but mostly himself, caught at the intersection of it all.

“That’s strange,” Nathan’s dad says, his voice hovering in the crosses of a businessman and a father. He still has his charcoal suit jacket on. “I could’ve sworn, Andrew, that I heard you say _psychosis._ ”

Dr. Cohen’s face shifts, just a minute adjustment.

All Nathan can hear is the bitter weight of that word in his father’s mouth.

“Again,” Dr. Cohen says, “an official diagnosis can be prepared with Nathan’s primary psychiatrist. I reached out to you because—”

“You would speculate on my son’s mental illness – a _serious_ condition, as I’m sure you’re aware – outside of a professional diagnosis?”

“Mr. Prescott. Sean. While a diagnosis is certainly the next step, my concern is for the symptoms, regardless of the cause, that are and have been adversely affecting Nathan and likely will for a long time, perhaps indefinitely.”

Nathan’s dad sits back, just a little, enough that his back looks pin straight juxtaposed to Nathan’s tense slouch. “You are implying that my son is incapable of independently functioning.”

“I am suggesting that inpatient services may be beneficial to understanding more of Nathan’s predicament and teaching him coping mechanisms that may not be so readily or clearly accessible in his current environment,” Dr. Cohen says, hands clasping together, eyes toward Nathan’s father, not Nathan, not the boy holding onto his sanity by the grit of his teeth.

“You are _suggesting_ ,” and Nathan knows this voice, turns his head to the side and closes his eyes at it, “that I send my son to an asylum.”

“Inpatient hospital care is—”

“You are _suggesting_ that my son, after over five years of struggling with a mental disease, is better off in an institution surrounded by other damaged children than with his own family. You have offered to lock my son up in a hospital where he is not allowed outside without authorization, like a criminal, or a barn animal.” A long pause, deliberate, not building the tension so much as he wraps it around his fingers like fabric to reduce the impact of the blow to his own knuckles. “Do you think one or two hours every week give you a better sense than me of what is best for my son?”

Nathan tried so hard to hide the voices that formed words within the tangled static in his mind. He looks back to Dr. Cohen, who has gone starkly pale, and tries conveying that through his stare, but he is a set piece in this room. He is deeply, deeply glad that in the last session he couldn’t work up the nerve to talk about the shapes at the corners of his vision taking humanoid form.

“Mr. Prescott, I have never implied any judgment on Nathan’s character or your influence and knowledge as a father.”

His dad’s stare is like a grip against his neck. Nathan glances up at him and feels himself compacting further under it. Sean Prescott looks back to his therapist and says, low but not gentle, “From what you’ve told me, it sounds like Nathan has manic bipolar disorder, which is hereditary on his mother’s side. Perfectly manageable and not at all debilitating, if over twenty years of marriage has taught me, with the proper dosage of antidepressants. Referring to Dr. Jacoby is indeed the next course of action here, but my family will discuss further treatment options as well as whether returning to your office is the best choice for Nathan. I certainly hope you don’t mind this appointment ending early, Andrew. I suggest you take the additional time to consider more ethical options for your patients.”

Nathan stands when he does. They pass by the receptionist without making another appointment. Nathan keeps his head down all the way into the car, and when his dad shuts the passenger door, he takes the seconds alone to release a thick, shuddering breath.

A few minutes into their drive back to Arcadia Bay, his dad’s grip on the steering wheel eases. The leather creaks against the adjusted pressure. He glances over to Nathan. His prescription sunglasses cast brown shadows over his thick cheekbones, like a muddy second pair of eyes. “…Nate, do you want to be institutionalized?”

“No!” It comes out too quickly. Nathan covers his mouth and presses his eyes shut, starts counting. He even told Dr. Cohen that hearing things might just be him overthinking memories or his own thoughts jumbling up inside his head. Nathan has been called a psycho for nearly half his life but never thought he might be diagnosed as one. He breathes hard, readjusts himself so he’s not so curled up anymore. “…I’m not doing this on purpose, dad.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not _trying_ to be crazy,” Nathan says, eyes burning, curling his hands over and over again on his jittering legs. “I swear, I can do better, I can be good, just, please, don’t…fucking, send me away—”

“Language, Nathan.”

“…Sorry.”

The only sound for a long moment is Nathan’s wet breathing, the way it cracks and wavers as he tries to get himself under control. He hasn’t been hit since he got the scar on his eyebrow. He thought he’d be strong enough to handle it the next time.

“I would never do that to you.”

“…Dad?”

He looks over. His dad’s face isn’t harshly lined anymore, just tired, matching the streaks of grey at his temples. “I’d feel most comfortable if you went to a different therapist, Nate.” The curve of his mouth goes ugly. “ _Inpatient services_. He may as well have suggested electrotherapy, or a lobotomy.” A pause, then, “Don’t tell your mother I talked about her. She doesn’t want you or your sister knowing about that.”

“Why not?”

Nathan’s dad taps a finger on the steering wheel. He casts a hand over his mouth. The gold on his wedding band gleams under the late afternoon sun. Nathan has never seen his dad take it off. For a moment, he keeps still, in fear of not his dad lashing out but him losing this untouchable moment. It almost looks like his dad is about to say something. But his face sets itself into sternness again, and he places both hands on the wheel. “She’ll tell you when you’re ready.”

Nathan nods, slowly, head weighing down once more. What he wants to ask – what he does not ask – is whether _she’ll_ ever be ready.

·

Outside, with him perched on a lunch table a few feet away from the dorm’s entrance, Nathan’s lungs open to the touch of a cigarette on his lips. The wind cuts hard on his cheekbones, drawing the smoke away in tight tendrils. He takes a few long drags, thinking about nothing, really, even though his head is full and the voices are creeping up louder. He usually doesn’t take his meds before a party – they throw his tolerance out of balance, and if he does a line all of his senses magnify, almost painfully – but this prescription is so useless he hasn’t taken them for maybe a week.

Only his upper body is shaking right now, though. A good day.

His shoes are solid on the seat, but the corners of his phone, balanced on his knees, keep rolling clockwise in his vision only to snap back at an angle that makes more sense whenever he blinks. He refreshes his Instagram feed enough for a handful of new pictures to show up at a time. Zach and Logan are outside the venue with Red Bull cans and a half-empty handle at their feet. Courtney’s outfit is sleek and trim; even if she’s one of Victoria’s friends, the only thing Nathan knows for certain about her is that she’s studying fashion design because she posts her sketches all the time, but her mascara is flaking off in little black specks down her face. He wouldn’t have noticed if Victoria didn’t make a habit of insulting her friends’ makeup mistakes before dutifully fixing them.

More than once, his eyesight blurs over, and when it takes a few minutes for his vision to clear he locks his phone and closes his eyes, willing the world back into place. It gives enough room for everything that came before to crawl up his hunched back. He grips his cigarette tight and wipes his palm over his face.

Hayden’s probably taking this long because he thinks Nathan needs time alone or something pathetic like that. It’s his own fault. He should’ve taken the offer to blaze in his room. The fog in his head is leaking out and spilling underneath him and it’s not a big deal, not even anything personal, but he just keeps thinking.

The whole drive back to campus, Victoria, still pale and grimacing, didn’t say a word, just kept her stare locked outside the backseat windows. Hayden cycled through stations until he found a song that was fast enough to fill the silence. Taylor had a plastic bag clutched in her hands, casting worried looks toward Nathan in the rearview mirror.

And that’s the worst part, he thinks. He and Taylor snip at each other but never fight; he actually kind of likes that she’s got the guts to call him out when he’s being obnoxious. But in the seconds in her shared room after Victoria drew her fingers away from her eyes, smudging the thin lines down her cheeks where foundation and mascara ran together, and asked _can you go, please?_ he wanted to hate Taylor. Wanted it to make more sense how he has been friends with Victoria longer but Taylor gets to know why Victoria’s gleefully venomous one moment and immobilized by a deeper anger the next in a way that Nathan knows is more than her usual stress.

He stops himself and rubs his palms against his knees, feeling dirt on them that seeps inside, runs against the currents in his bloodstream and to his heart.

It shouldn’t bother him. It matters to no one else that he needs her a thousand times more than she needs him.

The dorm’s doors open. Nathan looks over to find two people leave the building. Some chubby girl with a bad scene haircut, and Evan Harris.

The scene girl pauses and narrows her eyes at him. “Aren’t you supposed to do that thirty feet away from—?”

Nathan is on his feet when Evan reaches out to touch her arm. “Alyssa,” he says. The girl glares up at him, but something in her face shifts, not kinder, but more reluctant. Nathan sits, glowering. “Alyssa,” he repeats, softer. Urging.

“Okay,” the girl, Alyssa, says bitterly. “I’ll wait with Luke.”

Alyssa leaves, and Evan is left standing there, alone. The last time Nathan spoke to him was during the move-in weekend to call him a wannabe hipster nerd. If Nathan was a charitable person, he would’ve given Evan one of his packed suitcases to spare himself the tragic sight of his intensifying hipster aesthetic. Evan’s still got those huge glasses, but now he has upgraded to suspenders over his button-up shirt with the sleeves tucked up, fingerless gloves, and a beanie. Nathan looks him up and down in disgust. He can see ridges of muscle in his forearms, though, which makes him wonder when that happened, and immediately why that’s something he’s noticing in the first place.

Evan Harris is just his sister’s ex’s little brother, he tells himself. Such a circumstantial connection to him that it doesn’t matter, and he should calm down before he has an impulsive lapse of judgment, as Dr. Bill puts it.

 “Hey,” Evan says. His eyes are dark in the night, almost black. “…Can I borrow a cigarette?”

“Oh, wow, and here I thought you might think that’d be a little too _Vortex Club_.” Nathan takes one out anyway. “It’s called _bumming_ , by the way.” Evan makes this weird face, and Nathan says, “You know, like, _can I bum a cig?”_

“I know what it means,” Evan says haughtily, not offering a bit of self-derision as Nathan smirks. Evan approaches and matches Nathan’s posture, sitting on the picnic table with his shoes propped on the seat. He takes the cigarette with a nod and pauses.

“Got you covered,” Nathan says. He reaches out with his Zippo lighter, flicking it alight for Evan rather than passing it. Maybe it’s because he suspects Evan hasn’t smoked before, not like him at least, or maybe he just wants to see how much pride Evan is willing to swallow for a fix. To his credit, Evan keeps his fingers steady. Nathan has to cup his hand beside Evan’s for the flame to hold. The embers pass to his cigarette, and Evan balances the filter between his full lips before Nathan closes his lighter.

Evan closes his eyes. His lashes are downturned, short, and it takes Nathan a moment to realize he’s looking when he’s billowing out white smoke, bitter and familiar.

“Nice,” Nathan says jokingly, but there’s not much of a laugh in his voice.

“I’ll deny it to my dying breath if you tell anybody.”

“What’re you gonna do about the smell?”

It’s Evan’s turn to smirk. “I’ll just say I was sitting next to you.”

Nathan wants to tell him that’s not really an explanation, because it raises even more questions, but the novelty of Evan smoking beside him is something he wants to savor. He has heard him refer to cigarettes as cancer sticks with utter seriousness. On social media, he once referred to the Vortex Club as _boozed-up bureaucrats_. Nathan takes a puff from his own neglected cigarette and chuckles. “Don’t tell me you’re doing this for the aesthetic.”

Evan laughs. It sounds warm, a little deep, and when he smiles like that his eyes get all bright and narrow.

Nathan swallows hard and looks away.

“No. I ran out of refills for my e-cig.”

“… _E-cig_?”

“Yeah. Have you ever—?”

Nathan barks out a laugh, then leans his face into the back of his fist when he hears himself echo into the cold, empty air around them. “You’re such a fucking hipster,” he rasps. “Holy shit. Fucking, do you vape ironically or some shit?”

Evan has the nerve to look confused. “What’s ironic about that?”

“Okay, now I know you’re fucking with me.” Nathan quirks his lips upward, snuffing out the stub of his cigarette on the waxed wood beneath them. Evan wrinkles his nose but doesn’t say anything. “And look, you talk a lot of shit about my club, but I’m guessing your buddies aren’t this big fucking clan of acceptance if you gotta resort to smoking with _me_.”

“I—” But he pauses, rolls his cigarette between his fingers. Ash falls, scatters down his knee, onto his thigh. Nathan sees his gaze flicker downward, his free hand flexing a few times before he shrugs as if resisting the urge to wipe it off. “I promised Rachel I’d stop.”

Nathan blinks. “Stop smoking?”

“Yeah.”

He falters, tries reaching for some clever comment. He squeezes the still-warm filter in his fist. He thinks of the unmarked pills he bought earlier in the afternoon. He thinks of Victoria, glaring across the VIP section and muttering to him about _that junkie bitch_ Rachel Amber with her blown out eyes and croaking giggle.

Nathan doesn’t even know everything Victoria has tried. She hates when he snorts blow – told him she doesn’t like the smell but says the same about pot until the high kicks in – but he hasn’t talked to her about it.

He imagines what world Evan Harris lives in where cigarettes are a big deal, and his mouth twists, more confused than angry.

Evan glances back at him, his stare lingering. His throat works, like he’s working up the will to say something. He swallows instead, gaze flickering to the side. “Okay, so, I’m not interested in whatever it is, but…what did you take?”

“…What the _fuck_ ever is it to you?”

“I swear I’m not asking just to be a prick.” Evan takes a quick drag, mouth drawing tight like a bow. “It’s just that Rachel never tells me what she does, and she’s at the Vortex Club party right now.”

Nathan almost says _then why not ask her_ but he thinks of Victoria, her quiet rage in the car, and keeps silent.

Evan gestures limply. Smoke curls around his wrists in thin strips. “Why aren’t you with the rest of them?” He has this look on his face, but when Nathan looks, really looks, it’s gone.

He looks back at his phone. The corners of the screen are still rolling. He stands on numbing legs and dusts ash off his pants with his free hand. When he glances back at Evan, he’s not sure what he’s expecting. A carefully unaffected stare isn’t it.

A crooked grin, more like a grimace, darts across his face. “Don’t rely on bumming my shit.”

Before he goes back inside, itching to take something to clear his head, he thinks hears Evan say something, hoarse and quiet, but he can’t really be sure.

·

> **_Check your phone_ **
> 
> _To: **Nathan Prescott**_
> 
> _From: **Kristine Prescott**_
> 
> _Nathan,_
> 
> _You know you can talk to me about anything, right? I’m serious when I say that I can relate a lot more than you think I can. I’m just worried, and they’ll never admit it, but Mom and Dad are too. School’s important but it can wait – your health can’t._
> 
> _Please write me back when you get this._
> 
> _Kris_

·

Later, he isn’t able to pinpoint the transitions between seeing the deer, losing control of his car, having his body slammed between the airbag and his leather upholstery, then catching his breath as his unlocked his fingers from the steering wheel. It comes to him in flashes, moments captured in the film of his mind, and the smear of bloodied hide he expects becomes the streetlamp his car is steaming around when his eyes draw open. He does remember seeing the light flicker rapidly above, thinking how odd it is that his instincts, for once, do not draw him to take a photo.

His camera, unlike him, smashed through the cracked windshield. He does not notice now. Nathan remembers to blink, then feels hot streams down his cheeks. The airbag deflates and slumps over the wheel. His shoulder hurts when he gets himself to move. He fumbles for his seatbelt buckle. His entire body is a dim ache. The air moves in hot whistles in the thick space he has made for himself. Everything goes in sharp focus then far in the distance over and over again. He bends to reach the floor of the passenger’s side to recover his phone.

Hours ago he was sitting at a bonfire with his friends, wiping sand from his calves and wrists and laughing so hard his chest hurt. That sleepy warmth in his gut has been shocked out of him, but he’s driven like this so many times before, his friends have driven like this too, and no one has…no one…

His thoughts outpace anything his mind can hold. The black, round eyes of the deer gazing at him through the fog, motionless. Nathan, mind sleepy, reflexes dulled, veered his car to the side when he saw. His tires screeched against the wet asphalt and the deer’s antlers become brown veins against the sky; it cleared the highway barrier and escaped his sight into two steady leaps.

 _Breathe._ One voice, a kinder one, eases his back straight, his palms over his wet face. He has to push his shoulder against the door to get out of the remnants of his car. He spits bile once he makes it on the road. He calls a number he knows well enough to not force his vision to focus. He stares at the yellow lines down the road, the deer’s hoofprints pressing clear shapes in the sandy asphalt like the nose of a skull. There are so many. He breathes in thick, heavy wheezes. When she picks up, he can barely speak.

Black eyes peer at him through the brush beyond the highway barrier, rusted and chewed up. Their antlers are stricken like veins on a human eye. Staring. They know. He wasn’t that drunk. His car is totaled and his body is a dull throb and he can’t stop thinking crying stuttering. They know. Lights bleed into his vision. He’s the deer, prone for the slaughter. They’ll move his stiff limbs and take pictures with poison flooding their mouths. They know.

They grab at him, and he shrugs his shoulders away uselessly, but a familiar voice, a corporeal voice with a trembling mouth, says his name. He lets himself be handled away from the light, flickering now, maybe even before.

“Slow down,” Victoria says, quickly, more than once. “I can’t—I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

He swallows and rolls his tongue about his sour mouth. “Thhh…The deer.”

“Deer?”

“I almost…then, lost… _staring_ …”

_Can’t you speak, retard?_

“Nathan,” Victoria says. Her eyes are huge. He realizes that he’s babbling, now, speaking in scattered nonsense, locked in his own head. Her hands smooth out his collar, flatten a tear in his sleeve. Her image scatters in his vision.

Nathan draws from the dwindling remnants of control inside him and swallows hard, eyes burning. “I f-f-fucked up. Please don’t tell my dad,” he says in a long, wobbling slur.

He’s rocking by the time she gets him sitting down between the barrier and her car. He pulls the sweater draped around him over his head in the effort to block out the distorted faces that sink in from the corners of his vision, their mouths wide, teeth thin, eyes widening until the irises burst. He can feel his jaw still working around wordless speech. Another set of lights arrives at some point, he doesn’t remember when, but he sees it drive off and thinks, for a despairing second, that Victoria has left him.

She sits beside him on the dirt and gravel. He doesn’t remember when he began sobbing, just that his meaningless words have fallen to choked gasps and her thumbs slip against his cheeks as she tries to wipe his face clean. There’s too much, so much around him, in him, his mind, his mouth, and they can all _see_ him, look at his insides and watch the poison spill out, and he never wanted her to see him like this, never wanted to be like this, never—

“Breathe,” she says, urgent, a constructed calm that is betrayed in the way her hands shake on his face. “Please, _breathe_.”

 _I don’t know what’s wrong with me_ , Nathan wants to say. He feels sickness fester in his core. He wants to die.

The night continues around Nathan, but the roll of ghosts and echoes before him never ends. Another car pulls up, and Nathan squeezes his eyes shut. Fuck. _Fuck_ , he was so careful, wore his seatbelt and drove a little slower when he was drunk, and he’s the first one in their grade to get caught. His dad’s going to hate him. His parents will tell Kris, and she’ll be so disappointed, maybe won’t even come back ever—

Victoria’s hands ease him to his feet. His arms are so pale next to hers. He latches onto her elbows like a child. He doesn’t remember Victoria getting up. The way his eyelashes gum together when he blinks tells him that she left at some point.

He staggers with her to a car. The windows are tinted. She practically has to dump him into the passenger seat. His wheezes scatter around the car’s interior. He’s strangely reminded of that time in Florida when he saw a car hit a dog, the way its broken body heaved with piercing yelps then whimpering gasps. Kris had to pull him away from the sight. His mom gathered him into his arms when Kris told and he burst into tears. He hasn’t thought of that in years.

The door closes behind him, though the window is open. He hears Victoria ask a question, catches the tremble in her throat. And then he hears him.

“I’ll be sure to update you.”

Nathan jerks his head to the side. His dad nods over him at Victoria.

“Thanks, Vickie.”

When Victoria catches his stare, her face crumbles.

She deserves it, for betraying him.

He doesn’t understand. He wants to say it, as the window rolls up and closes him off from her entirely. He hopes it hurts her as much as it hurts him. He’d hate anyone else who’d do this. He never wants to see her like that again, like he drove a knife into her gut. He doesn’t _understand_.

The entire time, when he puts the car back into drive, when he makes a call, when he takes the highway out of Arcadia Bay, his dad doesn’t say a word.

Beside him, draped in Victoria’s cardigan, Nathan is so small.

·

Nathan gets anti-inflammation and muscle relaxant prescriptions. After some convincing on his dad’s part, he is written up for painkillers as well. The doctors ignore the sour smell on his breath. Sean Prescott has favors owed in high places outside of Arcadia Bay too.

The silence presses on into the hospital room, where Nathan is poked and prodded for bone or muscle injuries and Sean Prescott affirms that no, overnight observations aren’t necessary.

“My son doesn’t have a _car_ , you see, to drive home.”

It continues when his dad tucks the paper bag of pills in his jacket pocket where he once handed them over to Nathan, saying he knew Nathan was competent enough to know how to take them, thinking that it was Nathan’s problem to deal with.

On the drive back, Nathan clings to Victoria’s cardigan, nestled in his lap. It’s an angora blend, made in Italy. He wonders where he can get it clean. He wonders if she’ll even want it back. Under the rusty sunrise, all he can see is the matted fibers where he pressed his face.

Sean Prescott helps him into his room, into his bed. Nathan looks at him, the way he takes off his glasses and laboriously cleans them, still not glancing up to meet his eyes when he says, “Ryan Berry – the officer whose daughter is in remission – called me on his personal phone. He said cocaine was found in your car.” The glasses come back on. He finally looks at Nathan. The weight of his gaze is like a blow to the face. “Care to explain who that belongs to?”

Nathan shrinks up, knees pulling to his chest. He should be saying what his dad wants to hear. Blame someone else. Convince him he’s not a complete failure. But there’s nothing left in him. “…I’m sorry, dad.”

His dad gives him a cool, even look. Then, “You have an appointment tomorrow with Dr. Jacoby. It’s time you try antipsychotics to fix what’s going on with you.” And he stands up. His suit is barely wrinkled, but he smooths his jacket down anyway. He starts for the door but pauses at the threshold and leans back in to throw out, “Don’t ever embarrass me like that again.”

The door closes.

Aches are welling up in muscles he never knew could hurt. His face is raw. He scrubs uselessly at the salt caked around his eyes again. Nathan knows that later he’ll scrub himself raw in the shower, try not to scream but end up throwing things anyway, a child throwing a tantrum, looking for attention that never comes.

He knows. He knows he and his dad won’t return to even a reflection of how they were when things were good. But where desperation lingered there is now a deep, endless emptiness, and Nathan closes his eyes imagining the moment of impact in full.

·

Victoria’s car smells like tea and vanilla. The dashboard has hints of dust at the tight corners, like she tries to keep it clean, but the flooring still has scraps of road salt from the winter. Nathan gave her a portable vacuum a few months ago after that ride where he found her dog’s fur on his jeans. He doesn’t have to ask to know the box is still in the trunk.

When she drove them off campus, he didn’t protest, even felt a bit less tense until Victoria pulled over in the emergency lane at the threshold of Arcadia Bay.

Nathan loves the momentum of a vehicle, the weight of a wheel in his hands, but his teen years so far amount to watching the world soar past through a car window. He looks at Victoria, and he sees everything she tries, everything she’s done. Exhibit applications and networking, straight A’s, a smile that makes Nathan think he’ll be okay. But he sees everything it cost in the dark rings under her eyes, red stress spots dotting her hairline by her temples, scratch marks on her biceps where her sleeves have ridden up.

Or maybe, he realizes with a cold dread, maybe that’s his fault.

She leans back, face tinted orange with the sunset and speckled with the shadows of the trees around them, and leaves her key in the ignition. Nathan notices a multi tool dangling from her ring of keys. A gift from Taylor, maybe. Taylor lingered when Nathan slammed open the door to Victoria’s room, stood up from where she was sitting beside Victoria on her bed but, unlike Courtney, didn’t make a move to leave when Victoria told them, flatly, “Out.” Nathan, still soaking in all the stares he got ever since he made it back on campus, almost called Taylor a bitch, was right on the threshold of shoving her aside when Victoria added, gentler, “Hey, c’mon,” and rested her hand on Taylor’s shoulder.

Nathan didn’t have it in him to be jealous. Not when Taylor tossed him a sour, skeptical look when she walked by.

Victoria finally looked at him, face unreadable, and said they should talk outside. Nathan, already steeling himself up, agreed because the last thing he needs is people knowing the exact details of his mental breakdown.

He can see it in their looks, first the fear of a psycho among them, then curiosity directed toward the yellowing bruises on his face with even less subtlety than the airbags that caused them. They’re probably wondering if his dad hit him. Principal Wells waited for his dad to leave before saying _if you ever want to talk_ , but Nathan’s glare must’ve been enough for him to shut up and lean back with that careful look on his face.

“Look, I get why you’re pissed at me,” Victoria says, “but—”

“But _what_?” Nathan says, low, almost a growl. “I asked you one fucking thing—”

“You were drunk. You could’ve gotten arrested, not to mention what shit you might’ve been carrying.” Her hands fold over the steering wheel and tighten. “Plus the Vortex Club would’ve gotten in trouble, not to mention finals are coming up soon, oh, and I almost forgot to mention how I saw you stumbling in the fucking street like a zombie and I was freaked out, okay?”

“You can call me it, y’know,” Nathan tells her, glaring into the smooth expanse of her cheek as she stares firmly ahead. “A psycho. Everyone else does, right? They all fucking know.”

Victoria’s eyes flicker. She doesn’t blink for a little while. When she speaks, the ice in her voice has melted, and Nathan isn’t sure what to think about what’s left behind. “You were looking at things that weren’t there, talking but not saying _words_ and I did what I had to.”

“…You didn’t have to fucking humiliate me in front of my father—”

And she whips to him, her entire body twisting in her seat, face going red, “You think I _wanted_ to do that? Do you have any idea what it’s like, watching you having a fucking meltdown?” Her breaths come in tight, strained gasps, and Nathan realizes, with an awful jolt that goes from his chest to his knees, that she is about to cry.

He swallows hard, face burning.

She clenches her fists and looks up, taking a deep breath, but the next exhale ends in a sob anyway, and her face scrunches up as she shoves at him hard. “I _never_ want to see you like that!” She gasps, wet and shaky, and says, “You scared the shit out of me. I couldn’t _help_ you and I—I had to get _your dad_ to pick you up…”

The air is thick with her sniffles, her heaving breaths, Nathan’s deep, unsteady ones. _Help her_ , some part of Nathan, not quite a voice, not quite him, pleads. He forms sounds, then pauses, looking down at his lap. _You and me_ , and it’s his voice this time. “…I…fuck, I’m not really pissed at you, I just…” He leans his head back on the headrest. “I know I’m really fucked up. I just didn’t know I could…get like _that_ , and I just… I didn’t want you to be the one to be there and realize I’m a fucking lunatic.” He scrubs his palm against his eye.

The weight of her stare lightens, but he can’t look at her. Her voice softens the air, makes it breathable. “Nathan,” she says, no more hesitation, no panic, “I’m the last person you should be worried about judging you for being fucked up.”

She rubs at the insides of her elbows. It feels like an eternity ago from when he saw her trying to hide angry red slices there. Back then, she was just a girl who was hurting. Maybe she still is, but Nathan’s pull toward her is no longer based on him wanting to do one good thing.

The serious frown she gives him is an honesty he doesn’t think he can give back. She adds, “You don’t need to give a fuck about what most people think about you, anyway.”

“You’re not most people.”                                                                         

It comes without thinking, and Nathan knows instantly it is the most constant truth he has ever known.

He doesn’t look for her reaction. When the car starts again he allows himself a long exhale underneath the soft growl of the ignition.

And for a long moment, he considers just telling her. Giving honesty _back_. Saying it out loud even if he knows nothing more will ever happen. Even if it means disrupting this. Even if means _ruining_ this. She’s the only one who cared enough to stay. And he doesn’t think she’ll ever know how much that matters. How much she matters.

It’s dark by the time they settle in the parking lot. Nathan gathers everything inside him to speak, but when he sees her start to leave, the words scatter as he makes himself say something, anything. “Victoria, I…”

He looks to her, and she’s right there with him, real and close enough to touch, and god, she’s beautiful.

It’s then, ruminating on this, that he catches the look in her eyes.

His breath catches. He sees her glance away, press her eyes shut, and when she looks back her face is carefully blank and free from that dawning apprehension.

Everything comes whirling back inside. “I,” he starts, and because his voice is weak he clears it, feels his throat, thickly dry, convulse more than needed. “I-I’m really glad you’re my best friend.”

Crickets chirp in the damp spring air. Birds hum to the last reflections of sunlight around them. And Victoria looks at him, knowingly.

Red floods his face; he can feel it in the stifling, stale air of her car. He turns and opens the car door so she doesn’t see his mouth crumble into a trembling line.

“Nathan—”

“See you in class,” he manages, blindly shutting her car door behind him. He doesn’t run but his lungs are heaving by the time he closes his door behind him and buries his burning face into his hands.

He presses at his eyes when he feels them go wet, too stubborn or maybe proud to let himself cry because he doesn’t have a reason, not really, not when he must’ve known this would happen, and he wants to go back, stop himself from trying to distort something good again and being left with only his own humiliation tucked heavy in his lungs.

Nathan tries to even his breaths and relax, be quiet, be _good_ , but it comes apart and he finds himself not really caring because he’s never been enough to get anyone to stay.

·

> **_[No Subject]_ **
> 
> _To: **Kristine Prescott**_
> 
> _From: **Nathan Prescott**_
> 
> _Kris_
> 
> _please come home_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extended notes [here](https://grey-amethyst.tumblr.com/post/164577752957/tcik-authors-notes-chapter-3).


	4. "Why would I not?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for this chapter and onward ( **spoilers** , highlight to view): There are references to disordered eating in this chapter. Nathan also notices a girl who seems to have an eating disorder, and though she isn't outright insulted, she is described by him in less than flattering detail. 

**Part II: Partner**

**·**

**Chapter 4: “Why would I not?”**

·

Even after dousing his face a second time, he can still feel the burn in his cheeks, see pink blooming under his eyes now, too. He raps his knuckles against the pewter countertop and immediately goes for the hot water again. All the potted plants and pristine mirrors in the world can’t change that it’s a restaurant bathroom and he touched the sink.

He pats his face dry on his handkerchief. Looks at his reflection. The boy staring back is starkly pale against a dark background. Some creepy jazz song is on, just barely better than the slow ambiance in the private dining room his dad reserved. It’s only the four of them, but the room is meant for up to twenty-eight. When they saw that the long tables were still there rather than something more appropriate, Nathan’s dad gave the wait staff the same look he gave Nathan when he tried to take off his suit jacket.

Nathan breathes in deep. Flickers of his mother’s venom bleeding into his sister’s face, stony and furious, run on repeat in his head. Kris only spoke up when their mom brought Nathan up during her lecture on Kris’s irresponsibility.

He remembers how their mom adjusted the Swarovski bracelet, a gift that Kristine picked out one Mother’s Day, on her left wrist. Elizabeth Prescott is not on the payroll for the Prescott Foundation, but where his dad controls with heavy-hitting words, their mother has the precise manipulation of the painting tools she wields so well.

He left, anxiety sloshing about his uneasy gut, with some excuse about his meds making his nauseous, but it was impossible to ignore how his dad finally looked up from the dessert menu to watch him go.

Nathan’s dad made the reservation as soon as Nathan told him Kris was planning to visit. Kris asked him to bring it up in the first place, but he still expects his parents to round on him at any moment. Part of him wants to act out, control _when_ if not whether it’ll be his turn. Another part, one he’s not proud of, is glad that Kris knows things have changed since she left.

It’s only been a few hours since they picked her up from the airport.

His mind is going too fast for him to catch up, but he is pinned underground, chest crushing under the pressure. Outside, he might be able to get himself together. When he started feeling touches and seeing faces with huge insect eyes, he knew it was time to get up, but his legs were bouncing so bad it was like spasms shocking through him.

Kris used to think he shook on purpose, when they were kids.

He’s running his damp hands over his face, his hair, when he feels a vibration in his pocket. He has his phone unlocked before the possibility emerges that it, too, is a product of his mind, but it’s just a notification for a popular post Hayden made on Blackwell’s social media: him and his dad and brothers posing over Niagara Falls, smiling and whole.

He swears and leaves the bathroom. There’s a work event going on, with all these people in suits floating around the bar area of the restaurant. He sidesteps a waiter with a plate of wineglasses and feels his throat go dry at the smell. A line has formed at the building’s entrance. He can feel all their stares on him, can sense heads in the congested exterior turn to look at him with bare, blank eyes as he emerges into the humid summer air.

Once he gets to the curb, he leans forward, flicking his jacket to get more air flowing around his damp shirt. When he glances back, breathing hard, he sees that no one is looking in his direction. Just another bout of paranoia, but a strange wave of desperation leaks into the empty relief.

As he heads for the reserved parking, where his dad parked the Range Rover, he scrolls through his recent texts for anyone who can soak up his panic just for now. Victoria hasn’t texted him since she went back to Portland, and Hayden was so excited over the spring about his dad finally getting a long vacation; Nathan can’t steal his time away like that. He skips over all the dealers who have accumulated in his contacts, over half of whom already graduated. Even if he could consider them friends, Taylor’s working at her dad’s auto shop and Courtney is interning at a fashion company.

By the time he’s at the family car, he’s reached his oldest text thread: his mom telling him to unblock his dad’s number back in his second semester at Blackwell.

His hands curl into fists and he throws his phone past the curb and into the expanse of manicured grass beyond the car. He grips at his hair so he doesn’t punch one of the windows.

He breathes. Smooths down his hair. Staggers to the curb and sits, shoes kicking up packed dirt and small branches, brings his knees up, face buried in the space between them, and starts rocking. All anyone needs to do is glance between their car and the Corvette beside it to see him coming undone. But he can’t bring himself to be ashamed, and after a few long, shuddering breaths, he brings his chin on his knees.

In a few months, he’ll be seventeen, but sixteen still feels as helpless as being thirteen and without his sister. Sometimes it’s like he was left behind when his family moved to Oregon. It was so easy for them. He doesn’t get why nothing is ever that simple for him.

He almost doesn’t hear it, when someone knocks on the Range Rover.

Nathan scrubs at his face with his bare wrist and turns to find his sister. Kris smiles at him, close-mouthed. Her pencil skirt and white blouse are fitted and unwrinkled, and her long hair, redder than his, is caught in a neat ponytail. She has her cardigan in one hand and is adjusting her cuffs the way their dad does when he’s thinking about something. Everyone says they have their mom’s eyes, but Kris’s aren’t set in dark rings like his own.

“Hey little brother,” she says.

He turns away, knocking his hands together. Kris comes in slow, heels clacking on the concrete. She smooths her cardigan under her and sits beside him, then reaches over to bring him in by the shoulders.

They’ve never been touchy, but the last time someone held Nathan like this, tucking him by the temple at their collar with their chin on his head, was so long ago. He buries himself in her neck, cries when he can feel her throat rumbling with soft hums because he remembers this is how his dad used to calm him down.

Her hand smooths over his shoulder blades. He remembers her smell.

“I don’t know why I’m like this.”

“Trust me, I get it.”

“…I’m sorry.” Nathan takes deep, shuddering breaths until he can get himself under control. He peels himself away and upright, then wipes the muck off his face, sniffing. “Sorry,” he says again.

“Hey, it happens.” She smiles, and it only drives the ache in his chest deeper.

“No, I— _fuck_ —I should be glad you came back but—” he presses his fingers to his eyes as they start welling up again, “—shit. _Shit_.”

“Just relax.”

“I’m fucking _trying_.” Her face stays calm, and the rising swell of rage melts into confused hurt. “S-Sorry for making you come back.”

“You didn’t make me do anything.” Her face softens, almost wistful. Her lips part, exposing her long, rabbit-like front teeth, and she lifts one shoulder. “You just reminded me why I should have visited a long time ago.”

A scoff comes ripping through his throat. “Why? Did mom tell you I’m a—a drug addict or something?”

“She mentioned something. But she said you’re on a new medication and,” her voice lowers, not quite a whisper, “you haven’t been…taking anything else, right?”

“Yeah, with the friends I don’t have?” Maybe he should feel bad about how she openly winces. He looks down at his dress shoes and grimaces. “No, I’m…I’m sober. Have been all summer.” He still has the cloying headaches and chills to prove it. “Besides, you need a fucking car to get anywhere in Arcadia Bay anyhow. But, like,” and he makes little, meaningless gestures with his hands, “you’re all making a bigger deal of this shit than it actually is. I fucked up. I _always_ fuck up, I’m the family fuckup—”

“ _No_ ,” Kris says, so abrupt that he’s startled into flinching away and looking up at her. Her hand is stiff on his shoulder; the other comes up to fuss at her tie. “Don’t say that. You know that’s not right.”

He doesn’t, but he nods because seeing her frown makes an old tension in his gut coil up again. He wraps his arms around his knees, leans his chin on them, and takes a deep breath.

For a long moment, they sit there with the muted rustle of tree branches before them and tires on asphalt behind. In the distance, Nathan sees light flickering in the grass. He blinks, trying to clear this new ghost, but remembers he threw his phone in that direction.

“I’m not proud of leaving,” Kris says slowly as the glow fades. He sees, in his peripheral vision, her rubbing at her right eye, leaving the bulk of her wrist to press against her eye socket for a second. “Especially with how I did it,” she adds, strained. “But I _had_ to. I know you must have mixed feelings about Mom and Dad. I do too. I guess after they…y’know, tried the whole _think about your professional reputation_ thing after Melissa and I got caught, I realized that as long as I stuck around, they could never be proud of me for who I am instead of who they wanted me to be, and I had to make a choice.” Kris brings her hands on her knees, leaning forward to really look at Nathan. “I always wanted to leave Arcadia Bay, but I never wanted to leave you.”

And the way she says it, so easily, like she doesn’t know how Nathan has been trying to convince himself of that for three years now, makes his face crumble. She brings him close again. He says, maybe because he doesn’t want to start crying again, maybe because this is something he wants her to have an answer to as well, “I just don’t know why I can’t be good enough.”

“It’s not you. Dad just…” Her voice hangs, then presses on with a lower, careful tone, “When he was our age, all he wanted was to get out of Arcadia Bay.”

“…He told you that?”

“No,” she says, rolling her shoulders in a light shrug as they pull apart, “But…I doubt you even remember this, but he was thinking about getting his PhD before his dad died. Dad really loved history. And all that amounted to was crowded bookshelves.”

Nathan never knew that. His lips part, and he wants to say that it can’t be all for nothing, that managing to stay passionate about something for so long must have value in of itself, but then Nathan remembers all his own photos and not a single gallery acceptance or art award to show for it.

He watches Kris’s mouth compressing into a flat line. It occurs to him that his sister has probably never put this in words before, yet it falls like a fitted puzzle piece in the picture of their family left shuffled in his mind.

“I know it’s tough, but you’ve only got two more years left of high school.”

Nathan looks at her, and he sees in her half-smile a part he doesn’t found a spot for yet. _I know_ , he wants to tell her, _but you only have one year of college._ He wants to be selfish, ask her to take him in when he turns eighteen, but he knows, even if she’ll never admit it, not out loud, not to him, that Kris is only proud of this image of Nathan she has in her mind that’s softer and simpler and easily saved.

Minutes pass. Kris stretches her legs and wipes the loose dirt dusted on her heels. “What do you say? Want to give it another shot?”

Nathan nods. “I, uh, gotta get my phone first.”

On the way back though the parking lot, as a line of cars starts to pass, he asks in barely more than a mumble, “You’re not gonna leave home early, right?”

Kris’s faint smile breaks into something unsteady. Her gaze flickers downward for a second, and that reassurance is back so effortlessly he can almost tell himself it was always there. “I said I’d stay, didn’t I?”

·

Kris keeps her promise.

Early on, on nights when Nathan is going out to have a smoke, he hears her talking with his dad from the staircase more than once. Usually he can’t make out what they’re saying, but one afternoon he’s coming back inside from the patio when he hears the front door open. He waits around the corner for them to go back upstairs, but Kris says something and Nathan can hear the smile in his dad’s reply. His back sinks down the wall, because it’s been so long since he’s gotten his dad to sound like that. And Kris does it like it’s nothing.

She spends the last few days either in her bedroom or out of the manor, because she and their mom can’t be in the same room without arguing. She brings Nathan to cafes and movies, pays for his food and pretends not to observe how much he’s eating. Dr. Jacoby said an increase of appetite can be one side-effect of his current brand of antipsychotics – and that was a different issue altogether, learning there are variations of these huge tablets as if they were Tic Tacs or Altoids – however, lately Nathan’s only been able to take two or three nauseating bites from a plate before feeling his stomach bubble. Skipping meals isn’t uncommon for him, but his dad’s way of getting him to eat is saying he’s making his mom upset because she went through something like that too. At least Kris doesn’t guilt him all at once.

But he tries, because he can tell Kris is trying too.

She brings him to a beach in Newport on an early morning, and it’s like they’re kids in Florida again and all they need is the sky and sea and sand to fill an entire weekend.

Then some college students show up and start talking to her.

Nathan lingers in the water, and this he remembers, feeling too small and stupid to talk to anyone who liked Kris, because they only ever see him as her kid brother, the burden. He doesn’t even know if he can get into college, and they’re talking about grad school and studying abroad. They look the part too, all fit and attractive, and he is reminded of his own body, scrawny through growth spurts even though that persistent band of fat around his belly hardly ever shrunk.

Kris tells him, with her toothy, rabbit-like smile, that he should really try branching out and joining more clubs, and, not for the first time, he felt an odd longing that usually only comes when Victoria gets her flawless report card back or when Hayden mentions going out with his brothers or mom and dad.

She leaves again to reenter the life she chose, and in some ways the manor’s emptiness becomes a little kinder.

Nathan goes into her room after watching the taxi peel off. Hanging from a cork board by her desk are medals from debate team and a Blackwell newspaper clipping from her year in cheerleading. In the center is a calendar dated three years ago, left on August. His birthday is marked with eager, oversized letters. Victoria’s too. Kris’s fake move-in date for Stanford is circled with black ink.

Nathan brushes aside the gold tinsel that had fallen from the perimeter of the board and presses his thumb against the indentations of her writing, breathing deep. She had to have known she would leave. He spent too many nights mulling over it. She knew, and she didn’t tell him.

The rest of the summer is too hot, too long. Nathan spends most of it glaring at his phone as everyone posts pictures at beaches and venues and landmarks far from Arcadia Bay. He’s not grounded, but his dad made it clear that a rehab center is just a phone call away if he slips off the edge while preparing Nathan’s pillbox with half a tablet of painkillers amid everything else after the crash. Those are addicting, Nathan found out, but to him they just cut off time and made his camera gather dust without giving a decent high.

Not to mention the side-effects below the waist, which he only really noticed because the antipsychotics do the same thing. And it’s not even the worst part of taking the current kind his body least protests, not like that brand that made him want to piss all the time or the one that made him bloat like a carcass or every pill’s general effect of making him feel like he’s being doused with saltwater and plunged halfway down the surface, because it’s not like anything of note happens down there, but it just makes him feel like more of a freak.

If he’s tried certain kinds of drugs before, he doesn’t take them again just for the sake of it. Not like his mom and dad think, at least. He can survive without being on something, even if it makes the exhaustion that drags on his limbs more potent.

But the sweats. Pig sweat, staining his shirts, the tremors, his mood ricocheting between extremes like the midground is fire and it _burns_.

It’s probably not the best idea to go to Frank Bowers, but the few Blackwell dealers Nathan can reach are somehow all out at the same time. It occurs to him, jabbing in a text threatening to slash a guy’s tires and not sending it because he can tell he sounds like a total psycho, that he’d probably be less angry if they straight up told him they thought he couldn’t handle it or they just weren’t willing to risk him actually dying this time.

He goes to the beach in the late afternoon, although he isn’t totally sure that the guy will even be there. The sky is cloudy and the air is thick and sticky. Nathan rolls up the sleeves of his cardigan, grimaces at the veins of his wrist rolling under white skin, and tugs them back down. By the time he sees Frank’s RV, sweat is soaking through his shirt down his back. He eyes a narrow-faced mutt, part Doberman probably, tied to a flimsy ladder on the RV’s back.

Grime clings to the RV’s exterior, from the reflectors to the front tires, sparing only the windows which are streaked with lines of missed filth, a mimicry of neatness that forces Nathan to hold back a gag.

He tries avoiding the dog’s stare, even when it lifts itself up, flattens its ears, and bares its long teeth, as he goes around to the side door. He lifts an arm.

The dog lunges at him from his peripherals and rips out a bark like an engine going off. Nathan yelps, scrambling away, but the leash holds out at a safe distance.

The RV’s door swings open. Frank, a tattooed man with a short dirty blond beard and a switchblade hanging from a cord around his patchy throat, steps out and hushes the mutt. It closes its mouth, lips rolling over purplish gums, but keeps its ears tucked down. When he turns to Nathan, his ruddy face sours. “What the fuck are you doing standing out here? Waiting for an invitation? Get inside, quit drawin’ attention to yourself.”

Nathan simmers but follows because he notices the dog’s jaws are bigger than his wrists.

Frank nearly bashes in Nathan’s head when he slams the door behind them. The place isn’t as filthy as he imagined; the sink has a handful of dirty cups gathered around the drain and wrinkled clothes are tossed over the driver seat, a jacket slung across a small table, but the floor is clear and it smells more like a significantly less sweaty Bigfoots game than rotting food or unwashed clothes. Then he notices a bra strap dangling from an overhead shelf and resists a snort. That explains it. Classy, like the porn spreads Frank has plastered here and there over the walls.

Frank gauges him, sneer deepening, as Nathan tries deciding whether swallowing his pride will be seen as weakness or if being a Prescott will get him stabbed. That switchblade is bigger than any of the weird tools Taylor pulls out of her purse. He almost sees it coming when Frank closes in, jabbing his empty palms at Nathan’s chest, his sides.

Nathan throws his arms up, back pressed against the door. “What the _fuck_ , brah?”

“Do you have a wire in your pocket? Got the pigs waiting in the parking lot?”

Nathan sneers up at him. “If the fucking cops were gonna send a bitch snitch in here do you really think they’d choose my ass?”

Frank stares at him. His lip twitches. Then he nods and puts some distance between them. “Well, I usually don’t get a goddamn trust fund brat wandering up with the sweats after I get back from church.”

He almost says something that would’ve made his Catholic middle school teachers recite a Hail Mary, then decides, from one unstable guy to another, that going off within minutes of meeting the guy is phenomenally stupid. “Fucking—okay. What the fuck ever. Can I buy my shit and leave?”

Another glance-over. Nathan smooths out his sleeves bunched at the crook of his elbows where they have gotten damp. “The Vortex Club snobs need a new distributor bad enough to send a freshman over?”

“Screw you, man—”

“Oooh, I’m shaking in my boots. Get back to your Gerber ads, brat. I have some fuckin’ standards. No business with kids.”

At some point his hands rolled into fists. A voice, a little more muted like the others, but almost tangible in how he can feel the eye roll in it, starts up. _Stupid. Fucking **dumbass** , can’t even be a fuckup properly. _

_He sees you. He can hear. He knows._

“Shut _up_ ,” he breathes, tucking his chin down, eyes flitting past the blotches in his vision.

Maybe Frank does realize that Nathan’s not talking to him, because he’s just staring.

The dog barks then yelps outside, a quick rip of a sound, and Frank swears, elbowing Nathan out of the way and shoving the door open.

Nathan glances back at the RV’s innards before deciding that this was a stupid idea. It’s only a few more weeks until school. Maybe Hayden will bite the bullet and go for it instead, even if he usually gets the hard stuff from Nathan since despite his jokes he’s always a little nervous about getting caught.

When he steps out, he expects to witness a fight that’ll distract Frank from him, some kid throwing rocks at the dog or even the mutt escaping its leash. Instead he finds Frank crouched over, talking to someone with their legs crossed on the floor. The leash is slack, and a tail wags in and out from the space between the two of them.

“…can’t keep doing this. This has to fucking stop.”

The other person, a girl, says something that Nathan can’t catch at all. He tucks his hands into his jean pockets and tries to go around the other side of the RV, the long way, but the girl leans over, face curious, and he sees a flash of a blue feather dangling from her ear.

“Hey, Nathan!”

Frank turns around. The dog does too, stepping onto Rachel Amber’s long, bare legs to get a better look. It licks its lips and stares with wide eyes. “You’re still here?” Frank grumbles.

“Don’t be like that,” Rachel says, and the lilt of her voice, the way she pushes herself up and squeezes his shoulder, doesn’t hint at even considering what Frank was trying to tell her. Frank’s face is neutral, but his eyes flash at Nathan, and Nathan throws him an unimpressed look. It’s not like he’s Victoria, who’d be delighted for more ammunition in Blackwell’s gossip trenches.

It’s not like he has the energy to care either way about some spun out girl like Rachel Amber.

“How’ve you been?” And Rachel’s coming toward him, and she smiles at him so effortlessly his gut turns, his shoulders compact, but he doesn’t step out of the way of her hug. She smells like chemicals and weed, saltwater and strawberry shampoo.

Nathan just barely catches Frank smooth over the sour twist of his lips and tries conveying through an eyebrow lift that Frank’s got nothing to be concerned about here.

Rachel pulls away and touches Nathan’s shoulder too, gingerly, more fingers than palm. “You went off the radar after the accident.” He must’ve made a face, because then she turns to Frank, still touching him, and says, “Nathan’s fucking hardcore. He’s hella funny.”

“Oh, he’s _funny_ alright.”

“ _Hella_?” Nathan repeats incredulously.

Rachel doesn’t falter. “Chloe’s coming, she’s just running late.”

Frank runs a hand over his face. “Running on her own fucking time, like always.”

And she just smiles. It reminds Nathan of his sister at networking events, of Victoria when she’s trying to ease out a favor from someone.

“Well, c’mon.” It takes a second for Nathan to realize Frank is looking at him, less condescending and more impatient. “Before the pity party moseys up.” Nathan nods once, more of a jerk of the head. Behind him, Frank calls, “Watch out, my dog likes you but he’s still jumpy.”

But Rachel already has her attention back to the dog, leaning in so it can lick her face.

Nathan buys his usual off Frank, plus something inspired by his prescription in spring. Frank makes this face kind of like he’s grossed out and tells him that he better not kill himself because “I don’t need some yacht club piece of shit father fucking with me.”

It never occurred to Nathan before. All he wanted was to see if he could get anyone to buy drugs off him, especially since his dad’s been stingier with his bank account. He’s seen a few barely conscious kids at Vortex Club parties puking all over themselves without even rolling over to avoid the mess, and, when he’s in a bad place, pictures online of corpses bruised up and swollen after death.

Despite everything, he’d rather his family never find him than see his body like that.

Before he leaves, he gets Frank’s number. Nathan, ironically, is probably one of the safest people to buy from, if only he has his own brand of invincibility. Outside, Rachel is still on the ground with the dog, looking up and talking to a blue-haired girl Nathan vaguely remembers as Chloe Price. Victoria called her a wannabe butch once, and Nathan’s still not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but seeing Chloe’s combat boots, ripped jeans, and black beanie, he thinks he might have an idea.

She looks at him and raises her sparse, undyed brows. “Wow, Nathan Prescott. Surprised I haven’t seen your boney ass here earlier. Scared of getting sand in your panties?” Chloe has this grin on her face like she said something clever, and Nathan’s vision hues with red, wants to slap the bitch for ruining this for him, doesn’t even consider glancing over at Frank with his switchblade, but then Chloe smirks at the dog on the ground and says, “Holy shit Frank, you finally found something uglier than you.”

“First off, unlike you, the brat didn’t give me the whole little orphan Annie number for a score. Second—”

“Fuck you, asshole—”

Nathan makes eye contact with Rachel. She smiles at him as she rises, the dog whimpering at her legs, but points behind her with her thumb.

Some distance away, the raised voices die down, but not until Nathan is far from the RV and entering the parking lot.

·

It’s August 28th. Nathan’s going to be seventeen tomorrow, but all he knows right now is that it’s a Tuesday, he knocked out at two last night, and his entire body throbs with the numb ache his medication gives him.

Usually it wouldn’t matter. It’s the first day of classes, though, and Victoria’s nervous about making an impression on Mark Jefferson; his class is their first for the semester, and they need to prop each other up even when things aren’t completely back to normal yet.

She told him, early in the spring, that she’d be back in Arcadia Bay for the last few weeks of summer. He can’t blame her for not wanting to drive to San Francisco and visit art galleries like they talked about, half-joking, with just the two of them, but between that and the silence over social media and text he’s reluctant to break first, it hurts. It still hurts a little when he thinks about how she came to him while their movers were bringing their boxes and suitcases in and pretended nothing happened. Her arms were golden with the kind of tan that comes after weeks in the sun and he only grinned back at her because it was impossible not to with her looking at him like that.

It’s weird, that tug of loneliness that continues when she’s right in front of him, but Nathan knows he’ll get used to it.

They smoke outside the Prescott Dormitories, more modern and college-esque owing to it being finished in the twenty-first century. Cigarettes only. He thought about hitting the pipe when he woke up, but he promised himself he’d stay sober enough for these first few classes, if not for his own sake then for Victoria’s.

None of the juniors and seniors that leave for the academic building bother saying anything, but one girl’s stare lingers on Victoria until she catches Nathan looking. He’s just wondering why she’s got a full face of makeup on when it’s cloudy and damp out. She’s actually kind of pretty, Nathan thinks, then he sees the sharp lines of her shoulder blades as her plaited braid swings side to side over her backless dress, the ridges of her spine under her skin. Her knees bulge from her black stockings like knots on a tree trunk.

Victoria has a wince on her face too. “That’s Kelly Davis,” she whispers, even though Kelly is long out of earshot. “One of those new seniors. She said she tried getting in on freshman rounds, but she was in the hospital during the application deadline…”

Nathan rubs absently at the cords in his wrist. “Is she…um, y’know…?”

“Yeah,” Victoria says. “But she’s okay, I mean, we talked a few nights ago and, like,” Victoria thumbs at the lipstick stain on her cigarette filter, “she said I gave her a Lisa Eldridge vibe.”

Nathan has no idea who that is. He nods because that name sounds rich and pretty and famous—a lot like Victoria, just…whiter.

They grind their last cigarettes into the ground. Victoria reaches in her bag and pulls out a perfume bottle; Nathan leans away as she spritzes it over her shoulders and wrists, but when he notices it’s not a floral or fruity scent, he relaxes.

On the way to the academic building, the air is getting thick, almost misty, and Nathan’s hair feels like it’s going to fall out of place.  Victoria has to swipe her bangs out of her face more than once. It’s almost an ordinary day. He almost doesn’t notice, outside their photography classroom, how she rubs at the insides of her elbows with unsteady fingers.

“Hey—”

Victoria goes in first, and her expression shifts, so minute he wouldn’t have thought anything of it if Rachel hadn’t called out, “Victoria!” bright and eager inside the classroom.

Nathan goes in after her and sees Rachel Amber sitting at the table in the back, Evan Harris at her side, having pulled out a chair that juts out at an awkward angle.

Victoria doesn’t respond. She moves to the second closest table from the door. Nathan goes to sit at her right, glancing over. Rachel’s shoulders are deflated even if she’s still got that smile on her face. Then he catches Evan’s confused look.

His first thought is how strange it is, because what happened to Chloe, who used to be all over Rachel? His second bypasses all mental and physical filters and he says, face contorting, “Evan what the _fuck_ did you do to your hair? Did you get in accident with a blender?”

Evan has the decency to reach at his bare, stupid undercut with concern in his eyes, but Nathan’s more concerned with the pointy, confused pompadour-looking disaster up top. “What’s wrong with it?” he asks.

“You look like a depressed cockatiel.”

He sees Victoria’s pencil clatter to the table as she reaches up to cover her snort. Evan doesn’t go red until Rachel starts giggling. “Nathan, you look like you climbed out of the plot of The Outsiders.”

“You look like a soft serve ice cream.”

“You look like a knockoff Draco Malfoy.”

He waits for Victoria’s laughter to die down, but then Rachel has to press her face against the table to catch her breath, and he scowls. “Screw you guys.”

Their classmates filter in, and that’s the end of that. He ignores Victoria looking over him, at Rachel, and whips out his phone as he waits for class to start.

No one notices the last addition to the classroom until he speaks, not raising his voice but managing to cut through the noise effortlessly. “Nice to see everyone’s in early.”

Nathan looks over at Mark Jefferson, moving to his desk with a smile that’s kind of bashful, kind of amused, mostly practiced. He’s carrying the class textbook and a pile of handouts in one hand. He’s got a new camera, worth a couple thousand dollars and one of the models Nathan has been considering, with a strap over his shoulder, and he’s wearing jeans instead of slacks and a silver watch with a blazer that’s not fully buttoned.

It bothers him, not because Nathan has seen Jefferson like this before, all carefully constructed, saying what he knows he should say, but because he looks kind of…modern. A strange kind of _hip_ that seems uncool but everyone else might find endearing.  Nathan’s not sure if that’s intentional or if it’s only him that’s noticing it. If he saw his dad looking like that, he thinks he’d leave the room, and that mental image is enough for him to put the observation at the back of his mind.

Mr. Jefferson sets the papers and textbook down on his desk and takes his camera in both hands. It’s quiet enough that the sound of it powering on flows through the room. Mr. Jefferson’s eyes go narrow, switching through modes, probably, and he’s still looking at the viewfinder when he slides over a printed copy of the class roster, then lets his concentration melt over for a grin. “Okay. Let’s hope I have all your names right. Can I have everyone at the back table where Rachel and Evan are?”

For once, no one drags their feet. Nathan pulls over a chair for Victoria to sit, because she keeps pulling at the hem of her dress. She raises her eyebrows at him, and he flickers his gaze at Rachel Amber’s direction.

Victoria sits.

That’s three of them sitting, three standing. Nathan turns forward and catches Mr. Jefferson looking, his hands still working at positioning a tripod. He nods, almost imperceptibly.

Nathan’s dad used to tell him he was arrogant before he ever raised a hand to him. He feels an odd twist of anxiety in the tight grin he forms automatically, even if Mr. Jefferson’s attention is already back to the tripod.

Being on this side of the camera feels off. He’s too sober to manage any expression that’s polite and genuine right now.

He sees Victoria rub her shaking hands over her legs under the table before she folds them, still and elegant, where they can be seen.

Nathan glances to his empty side, gritting his teeth, ands tells himself he needs to at least try.

He doesn’t see the flash coming. He blinks past spots in his vision amid a few exclamations of surprise around him. Rachel, toying with her earring, has a rare grimace on her face, hinted only by the flex of her jaw, a dimple at the corner of her mouth. 

“Sorry,” Mr. Jefferson says, “I couldn’t resist.” He has that smile on his face. “Candid photography is an old passion of mine. When I took this class – ancient history, I know – my favorite book was The Decisive Moment. Now, can anyone tell me whose work is featured in that book?”

“Henri Cartier-Bresson,” Victoria chimes, even following the accented pronunciation that Nathan stumbles on. 

“Ah, that’s exactly it. Victoria, right?”

She nods, raising one of her hands to the short hair behind her ear before sitting up straighter.

Mr. Jefferson has them adjust themselves. Everyone in a little closer, heads tilted this way or that. He takes the next shot without flash, then glances over his camera with his face serious. He adjusts the lens, takes the camera in his hands at one point, and Nathan’s glad his smile isn’t too big because his cheeks are only now starting to ache.

Mr. Jefferson’s process isn’t like Nathan’s, at the very least. He’s gotten quiet but he’s not spacing out or breathing hard. After the accident, it’s like Nathan’s mind reached a point of hyperawareness of the way he breathes and walks and enunciates. Maybe it was just the sobriety paired with the bone-deep muscle pain.

Nathan’s last picture of note was near the lighthouse. He saw a moth with one wing damaged twitching on the ground and didn’t even hesitate to drop to his stomach and take a picture, poke at the dying thing until he noticed it stopped moving. Guilt tightened his neck, something that has become common these days, like going a day or two without eating or shivering when he wakes up, but it’s not like it was a person, so he doesn’t get why it bothered him.

He doesn’t really notice he has spaced out until Mr. Jefferson says, “Excellent work. I’ll chose the best one and hang it up tomorrow. Here’s hoping you’ll all agree with me.”

Long after they’ve all sat down, Nathan is still out of it, and he isn’t sure why.

·

As the week wears on, Nathan keeps finding himself swallowing on a dry throat, skin itching. Cigarettes aren’t something he needs, but lately his lungs have been getting tight enough to start stepping out of the building between classes to light up.

During the first Vortex Club meeting of the year, all he can think about is the weekend and how he can finally get loaded without worrying about embarrassing himself in class. He wouldn’t have gone if Victoria wasn’t planning so much of it, if he didn’t know that so many of those plans require more funding that his dad’s latest Blackwell grant should cover.

Mr. Jefferson stops by for a minute or two. The Vortex Club faculty advisor is an art teacher by tradition, and their previous advisor, too, made it clear that she wasn’t eager to interfere with their creative process. Mr. Jefferson also takes the chance to add that the party is a good place for those who are in his class to work on their first assignment – a candid shot, or “a story captured, not carved, by the narrator.”

A good deal of them are in his Intermediate Photography class with minimal complaints besides the lengthy readings, but after he leaves someone says they’re turning in a picture of the first hookup they find and everyone laughs so hard they end up having to shush each other for the meeting to keep going.

Victoria keeps urging him to go to Jefferson’s office hours with her since Nathan has talked to him outside of a teacher-student context and he’d definitely know how to get him off one of his tangents and start talking about making it in the industry, right? Mr. Jefferson holds them late into the afternoon too, apparently, but Nathan’s usually hit a blunt by then, and he figures only the more devoted seniors have a reason to stay that late.

The party is on Friday, and before he leaves to ride with Hayden later in the afternoon, he sees his new camera pointed at him from his desk. He knows it’s off, but he checks anyway. He goes through his saved photos instinctively, but there aren’t many in the first place, and none he can pass in.

The venue is a warehouse at the edge of Arcadia Bay they’ve rented before. If he really wants to, he can climb the fence out back and find something interesting in the wooded area, but he feels like Mr. Jefferson is looking for human subjects, and after the accident he’s not so big on risky shots anyway.

He remembers getting back his old camera with the lens shattered, the viewfinder torn off entirely, and sets his new one down.

Nothing is different about this new party, just new faces, kids Nathan has never noticed before outside on skateboards, cradling red solo cups by the walls, moving clumsily on the dancefloor. Apparently, this year they’re trying to make Vortex Club events a little more open across the student body.

Nathan cranes his neck to see the skylight over the dancefloor. The full moon’s glow bleeds into the glass between the shadows of the panes strewn over the floor, but he can’t actually see it.

Alcohol thrums in the air on the way to the VIP section and he kind of hopes that the newbies aren’t going to be stupid and ruin their chances at booking this venue again. Mostly he’s ready to just get his mind off everything. He downs shots with the guys, loses his heartbeat to the music, ears ringing. The ceiling rolls in his peripherals. When the bartender starts pouring Jägerbombs a part of him stalls. He glances back from the bar and past the stir of VIP members, sees purples flash as the curtains separating them from the rest of the partygoers flutter. The skylight desaturates the dancefloor. Everyone’s moving slower than normal. He reaches into his jacket and clutches at his phone, already thinking about the best angle to get this picture.

“Hey, dude,” and Zach nudges him. Nathan looks back and Hayden is finishing off his drink. “You got any of the good shit on you?”

He smirks. “Fuck yeah. After this, though.”

He missed drinking. He misses coke. His body is hollow and the glass is full in his hand. Logan counts to three. Nathan tilts his head back at two.

And hunches forward with a gag that heaves his entire body. He slams the drink against the counter and squeezes his eyes shut until he knows nothing is coming up.

The bartender takes his drink – “The _fuck,_ brah?” – and the guys crowd in closer. He elbows them away before they can touch him and slides off the barstool and onto his feet. He holds fast onto the counter when his legs tremble.

They’re laughing at him, but he’s too focused on finding his balance to really be mad. “And Nathan strikes out—”

“Fuck you.”

“Dude, I told you we should’ve gotten chasers, he’s gonna blow chunks.”

“Fuck _that_ ,” Nathan says fiercely. His only saving grace is that he has never thrown up at a party. He glares at the bartender until he spots the disturbance in his drink where he spat it back up. Gross.

The worst part is that the drinks have only just started hitting him. In the spring, he was able to keep up with Hayden without so much as a hiccup. He knows he can keep at it if he pushes past his body’s resistance, but it’s not worth it if getting himself humiliated again is a possibility.

Nathan sighs. He bumps into Zachary as if to knock him away – he’s close enough for Nathan to sense his body heat, anyway – and sneaks his supplies into his pocket. “Jesus fuck. I can’t believe I’m tapping out like a bitch.”

“You sure, man?”

“Logan, I don’t give a fuck, I need to convince my dad to get me a new car.” And for a moment their grins falter. “Shit, don’t look so disappointed. None of you assholes are driving it, anyway.”

“Screw you, Prescott!”

Nathan only snickers and pushes himself off the counter. He’s halfway to the emergency exit, already sneaking a cigarette out of his pocket, when he feels a hand on his shoulder and shrugs it violently away.

Hayden has the remnants of a smile on his face, but his brows are pinched, eyes gentle. “…Nathan, man, are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Nathan says, more of a grumble than anything. “Just…fuck, when I actually take my meds my tolerance goes to shit.”

“You’ve been, like, sober during the summer though, right? You’ll get used to it again, dude. You’ll be alright.”

Nathan thumbs at the cigarette between his knuckles and chews at his lip. “…Have you seen Victoria?”

“Want me to get her?”

“No, I just…she’s been stressed out. I don’t want her having to deal with my shit again.”

Hayden nods. “She’s around. If she asks, can I let her know where you are?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He makes to leave, but pauses first. “…Thanks, Hayden.”

When Hayden pats him on the arm, he doesn’t flinch away. “Anytime, man.”

Nathan weaves past the other Vortex Club members like set pieces. They’ll all dancing, laughing, playing shitty games and nursing beer. He leans his shoulder against the door to open it, slipping the filter between his lips as cool air bursts across his face, and glances back, struck with a deep, strange hurt that reaches into the pit of his gut.

Outside is a different world. The chain-link fence behind the building is peeling with rust; boxes line the graffiti-spattered brick wall. He waits for the door to shut, sealing off most of the music except for the bass. He can feel his heartbeat again, sense his blood tremble down his arms and legs as the trees rustle before him, and he sighs, leaning back against the door and taking his unlit cigarette into his hand and then into his pocket.

Vortex Club parties are where he comes to life and succumbs to the perimeter of the eye of the storm. Maybe Hayden’s right. Maybe he just has to get used to taking shit again. Or maybe he needs to lay off the pills. Stop feeling like a zombie, because even if the voices are distracting and sometimes scary, they’re more him than the exhausted shell of his mind is.

A small part of him wonders if it’s because he’s older, now, and the upperclassmen whose encouragement he trailed after have almost all graduated. No one he’s going to school with now has ever attended Blackwell when Kris was there. He breathes out a short laugh.

He never did have to prove he existed outside of his sister or his last name. Nathan’s a fuckup on his own. 

To his left he hears gravel scratch against the asphalt. A low inhale. He rolls his head to the side, eyes narrowing.

Evan Harris is sitting on a couple of wooden crates, looking up at him with a blank face, his usual hipster getup on with few alterations: glow-in-the-dark bracelets around his left wrist, a fake gage dangling from his right ear lobe, and his glasses perched on his stupid haircut.

Nathan is deciding whether he should let all this poison inside him burst out when he realizes.

Evan tucks his camera by his side before Nathan approaches, alcohol and something else lightening his steps, his smirk, as Evan stands.

“You hipster fuck! Those glasses aren’t prescription?”

“They _are_ ,” Evan says sharply, but he’s not trying to get away, and when Nathan leans in and reaches out Evan takes his glasses and lifts them over their heads, stretching to the balls of his feet, snorting when Nathan struggles to grab them. “Hey!”

“C’mon,” Nathan says, and in the rush, playful in a way he doesn’t think he’s felt since he was a kid in middle school brimming with the pride of making his first friends, he can almost ignore how close their bodies get, the firm set of Evan’s shoulders.

But Nathan is nothing if not petty, and he reaches to brace himself against Evan to close that difference in their height and seizes his prize. Evan laughs, crisp and full, against his ear for a second. Nathan steps back and puts the glasses on. His vision, nearly as good as his mom’s, doesn’t change aside from a smudge here and there.

“You hipster fucking asshole!” Nathan shoves at Evan when he comes in again, laughing so hard tears start pricking at the corners of his eyes.

“Shut up, that’s my _shecret_.”

“ _Shecret_?” Nathan repeats with a quirk of the brow.

Evan, face flushed with his own laughter, nods and runs a hand through his hair. “See-cret,” he says with a drawl. “I swear, Rachel gave me _one_ drink.”

“Rachel?”

“She dragged me here.”

Evan sits, still breathing kind of fast. Nathan sits beside him, and if they’re a little close, it’s because a dull, chilly breeze rolls by, shaking the chain-link fence in front of them. Nathan lets a grin cut over his face and says, “ _The Vortex Club sucks_ , huh?”

“You guys…” Evan looks to him, gaze flickering over his face, then darts his tongue over his lips and chuckles, glancing down and gathering his camera back into his lap. Nathan blinks stupidly, then remembers the glasses are still on his head. He passes them over. Evan nods, the outline of his wilder grin from earlier tamed, and puts them back on. “You have a unique aesthetic, I’ll give you that.”

“You mean we throw killer parties.” Nathan nudges him and brightens at the way Evan’s mouth presses into a line but his eyes pinch with a repressed smile. “C’mon. At least say the venue is bomb. This is Hollywood teen movie type shit.”

“Okay, okay.” Evan takes a deep breath, like what he’s going to say will pain him, and says, “The venue…makes an interesting setting for pictures.”

“Shut up,” Nathan says. He shoves at Evan playfully, but Evan just laughs again. Nathan swallows and finds that he doesn’t mind the way he can almost feel the vibrations of it, the way Evan rocks back and covers his mouth and shuts his eyes tight, the rustle of his khakis against Nathan’s jeans. Of course his glasses aren’t prescription; his eyes aren’t magnified or distorted by the lenses. Nathan wonders how he never noticed that before.

“No, I’m serious. Mr. Jefferson shot down all my ideas so far, so…”

When he trails off, Nathan realizes that he didn’t mean to say so much. Nathan watches the furrow between his brows, the way his tilts his camera in his lap, and replies, “Fuck, I’ve barely even thought about the assignment.”

“Seriously?”

“I mean…” And he half-shrugs, grimacing. “It’s not like I’m gonna get a good grade on it anyway.”

And for once Evan looks _annoyed_ , more than his judgmental stares when he comes across Nathan and his friends smoking pot at night or messing with some loser who stepped out of line. “ _Why?_ Are you joking? You’re just about the best photographer in our class. Maybe the whole school.”

“Are _you_ joking?” Nathan echoes, breathing out a laugh. His body feels warm, loose, and lying doesn’t come to mind, just the quickest way to get Evan to stop looking at him like he’s more than some drunk kid sitting behind a warehouse. “Lots of people are good at something. Doesn’t mean shit if they’ve got nothing to show for it.”

“But you do. During the exhibition last semester, you had the triptych – you know, the trio—”

“I know what that is, asshole, we take the same fucking art classes.”

“Yeah, yeah, fine. The triptych with the two deer and the coyotes, right?” Nathan carefully keeps his face blank. Those were from before the accident. He remembers seeing coppery splatters trailing beyond the highway barrier, leaving his car in the emergency lane, and stepping quietly into the brush with only the glow of his high beams to show him the way. He was on something, he knows, because seeing so many eyes blink against his camera’s flash didn’t unnerve him, nor did the doe, hooves stained but otherwise standing tall. “Anyone can take a picture. You _found_ that.”

“That’s because I’m the only one in this school crazy enough to go into the woods at night.” He sees the shift in Evan’s expression on the dawning realization that Nathan is being absolutely serious. There were no dead animals to submit, nothing cruel by Nathan’s standards, and yet he hunches over, arms guarding his lower stomach. “And don’t tell me that when you give enough of a shit to have an actual professional portfolio.”

“ _Professional_ is a bit loaded—”

“Evan, you have a leather-padded binder you carry around with you all over school. If it’s not a portfolio it better be full of drugs or knives or some shit.”

“Anyone can make a portfolio,” Evan tells him, for once blunt, his voice absent that usual self-assured smoothness. His glasses have fallen down his nose, but he makes no effort to push them up. The impressions of the nose pads stand bright and red against his skin. Nathan wants to reach out and set the frames back in place. “But you. You’ve got ideas. Creativity. Mr. Jefferson said I have a tendency to be formulaic.”

And Nathan keeps quiet where he thinks it’s his turn to respond, because that’s not exactly wrong.

Evan glances down at his fingers, curled drunken and unsteady on his camera. “Would it be lame if I said I only agreed to come because I couldn’t think of anything else for the assignment?” The corners of his mouth are faintly upturned, but there’s a tightness to his face, his hands.

Nathan feels a gust of wind and sits straighter. The world is steadier when it’s fixed on Evan, and while he isn’t sure if he wants to know what that means, he does think Evan looks better with that smile from earlier on his face. “…Can I see what you have?”

“Oh—” and Evan blinks fast, fumbles with his camera as if he’s forgotten how to use it until the screen goes on, “—sure.”

He clicks through his photos one at a time, and Nathan can see the effort put into them, all sorts of angles and lighting and people. Evan perks when Nathan leans in on one, releasing an exhale that crescendos to a low whistle.

“Oh, this is fucking good.” Nathan leans in closer and Evan tries angling his camera for him to see. He ends up propping it with the lens cap balanced on the space where their legs meet, Nathan holding one side, Evan the other. “How the hell did you figure you’d get the full moon like that?”

Evan glows with obvious pride. “I didn’t. I just happened to see it from that angle.”

The thrum of bodies on the dancefloor is dotted with the purples and blues of the rave lights, but the celling window shows the clear sky punctuated with a full moon. He wonders if the Vortex Club is always like this, a backdrop to brilliant moonlight, a world tucked away from something none of them can reach. Nathan realizes that Evan must’ve been at the very edge of the warehouse to get this full-body perspective. Then he remembers that he needed to crane his head to see the window when he first entered the building. “Wait, did you lay on the floor to get this?” His voice spills with more awe than judgment.

Evan, maybe detecting that, shrugs and glances away, but Nathan can see he’s smiling by the dimple that puckers his cheek. “Yeah. I get it’s weird and pretentious, but—”

“It’s fuckin’ badass.”

For a moment, he doesn’t get an answer or even a look. He sees Evan’s jaw work a few times before he says, “Really?” so quietly it’s like he isn’t even aware that it is the word he has chosen, or simply fallen upon in the absence of that amused look in his deeply brown eyes.

“Yeah.”

Nathan notices the camera’s screen dim, ready to go into power-saver mode. He moves his thumb to tap against the screen, catches a few details he didn’t see before. The VIP section in the distance, the space between the open curtains cloaked in darkness. A small group by the wall with glimmering vape amid the glow-in-the-dark smears on their arms.

And Rachel, dancing with someone hidden by the crowd, a smile on her face that turns her eyes into bright wisps of stardust.

When he turns his gaze upward, he catches Evan’s stare. The way his throat bobs when he sees. The way he nods and smiles, faintly, when Nathan loosens his grip on the camera, essentially giving it back for him to hold in his lap. Evan looks down at the screen for a moment, then shrugs, more of a twitch than anything.  “…I wish I could photograph more like you.”

Nathan watches as he glances back at him, almost hesitantly. “…Why?”

“Why would I not?”

He looks at him like it’s all so obvious.

Nathan shifts his legs, notices his knee bumping into Evan’s. The crate beneath him creaks, and his heartbeat is thick but fast, warm under the weight of alcohol. He should’ve drunk less, he thinks, because it’s something he would’ve noticed earlier. Like how Evan’s supposed to be taller than him, but sitting down they’re level with each other. The flecks of black along the rings of his irises. The way he thumbs at his bracelets until his gaze finally flickers downward when Nathan parts his lips.

Nathan’s blood thrums with something new. A feeling he’s been vaguely aware of but never made to look on until now. His world fades outside this moment, bleeds into his longing fingers and aching throat, the deep burn of Evan’s cologne and the warmth of his body, and Nathan can feel his breath, crisp and even in the closing space between their lips—

So he turns his head, his entire body away, raising a hand to rub along the back of his neck and down to his opposite arm. He clasps his hands together and, noticing how they shake, pulls the fingers of his other hand back, breath fast, heart beating low and heavy in his chest.

The end of a song comes. The seconds of silence are filled with cheering, chanting, then the opening beats of another one with the same tempo, the same muffled words. All the same, always the same.

When Nathan brings himself to look back at Evan, he sees that his body is tilted away now too, his legs drawn close. The profile of his face is shadowed, and Nathan can’t see his eyes.

He swallows. Tests his lips on a few shapeless words before bringing his voice in to say, “This party kinda blows, right?”

Evan glances at him. His lips are parted, mouth pressed a little taut. “…Are they all like this?”

“We, uh, have another later in the month. You can find out.”

The wind blows sharp and brisk over their bare skin. Evan’s eyebrows draw close, and he glances down, relaxing his face, and starts, “So, um…” He looks to the trees, knee bouncing, and turns back to Nathan. “Rachel, she, uh, has this thing about eighties movies. We go on these marathons sometimes. I mean, she does, I’m just there to riff on them. But she has party supplies, so I know it’s pretty lame, but if you ever want to…you know, have a drink and make fun of bad movies, you can join us if you want.”

Unexplained relief isn’t all that floods into his body. He can feel tremors riding up his legs. He rolls his palms up and down his jeans and is about to decide when the exit door opens.

A blast of warm air sinks behind the building. Victoria glances both ways before she spots him. Several locks from her bangs are falling down her brow bone instead of being swept to the side, like usual. She exhales through her teeth. “God, I was looking for you everywhere. Can—Can we talk?”

He’s on his way to his feet when he catches Victoria glancing around him, her face careful, measured. “Yeah,” he replies, a little too loudly.

She reenters the building as he comes close. Nathan blinks against the darkness that swallows her whole and rubs at his eye. The door hangs open against his back. He pauses and glances back at Evan. Still sitting there, looking down at his camera, which Nathan sees is off.

“Hey,” Nathan says, halting, mouth working into a frown.

Evan looks up at him, and that expression on his face scares him, because no one has ever looked at Nathan like that before.

(In a different world, Nathan would’ve asked if he had his number. He would’ve told Evan to message him with when the marathon was. He would’ve seen in himself what inspired that half-hopeful look in Evan’s eyes, and what happened in the weeks and months after may have gone so much differently.

This is not that world.)

Nathan swallows, says, “I’ll see you around?”

And Evan nods with a tight grin, looking back down at his camera.

Victoria weaves fast through the crowd, and Nathan forces himself to adjust to the dim lights. He stumbles once, legs prickling, and shoves aside some kid who’s in his way. Inside the VIP section, he catches up to her, but only because she’s standing between a senior and one of their new members, a freshman who has either managed to try out heavy blush or has a particularly red drunk face.

“I don’t know why you’re being such a _bitch_ ,” the senior says, and Victoria moves her arm to the side just far enough enough to stop Nathan from getting in his face.

“Well,” Victoria says, her face an equal mix of unbothered and amused, “I don’t know who _you_ are, because you’re definitely not a member of the Vortex Club.”

“Are you kidding me? I—”

“If you’re really can’t help but creep on freshman pussy, Arcadia High is a ten-minute drive away. Maybe one of those sluts is insecure enough to settle for your greasy ass. I can guarantee that no one here tonight is that drunk or desperate, so why don’t you kindly fuck off?”

The senior glares at her, the freshman, and finally Nathan before he stomps away, elbowing Nathan along the way and breathing out another “ _Bitch_ ,” as he goes.

Victoria touches her fingers to Nathan’s tense shoulder and turns to the girl. “Mandy, what the fuck are you doing entertaining these dumbasses?”

The freshman—Mandy—smiles up at Victoria even with her arms crossed and tucked tight to her sides. “I…um, I’m _really_ —”

“Ugh, seriously? Your sister was a member and she didn’t even teach you how to drink?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay if you’re a lightweight as long as you’re not being a fucking idiot. Give me your phone.” Victoria uses it to send out a text with a number she seems to have memorized. “I just texted Courtney; she might have the patience to drive your ass back. Go find Taylor and wait. Or Hayden, but just tell him you’re not interested if he tries being smooth, he’s good about actually listening.”

Mandy takes her phone back and rubs at her eyes. Nathan can see the wet shine in them before her phone’s screen dims. “…Thank you, Victoria, I—”

“And now you fucked up your eyeliner. Nice. Don’t thank me, stupid, just look around and don’t be an idiot, okay?”

With that, Victoria continues onward. Nathan’s anger has mostly dissolved into annoyance by the time they make their way to the other side of the curtains to the little nook that the prep team always makes for their parties. Nathan only knows about it because Zachary gets so annoyed when Hayden calls it the Boom-Boom Room.

True to its name, after they step past the curtain, Nathan sees a topless girl getting handsy with some dude on the wall opposite the huge stereo blocking them from the general party.

“Out,” Victoria says, pointing.

The topless girl gives him and Victoria an odd look. Nathan stares at her breasts, looks up at the guy, and shares a grin with him. Victoria doesn’t even have to yell at them because the girl has got her shirt on and a glare directed at the guy before Nathan can consider a second look.

The curtains settle. Victoria sighs and eases herself closer to the corner, where the vibrations of the stereo are fainter. Nathan watches her bite her lip, glance over his shoulder, and lean into him. “What were you doing with Evan Harris?”

“Oh—nothing. Just, uh. We were both drunk and he wanted to show me his pictures?” She raises an eyebrow. “For the—For the assignment. That I haven’t started.”

Victoria’s expression clears, but she continues shifting her weight from leg to leg. She keeps looking behind him, like she’s expecting someone to show up. Like she’s scared someone will. Nathan frowns, tries to ask, but she whispers, “Mr. Jefferson gave me his number.”

Everything comes to a stop. Nathan inhales sharply. “What?”

“Fucking—” Victoria turns her body to the wall, presses her fingertips just under her closed eyes. “It wasn’t… Um, at the beginning of the party, he showed up, I guess to, y’know, check on everything? Like our last advisor did.” She lowers her arms, kind of shrugs, but she doesn’t look at him. “And I was talking to him, and he pretty much told me to text him if there was any trouble.”

Nathan breathes. The world eases itself upright, molds itself back into one continuous shape around him, but it feels off. “ _Pretty much_?”

“We were talking about my parents’ gallery,” Victoria says with eyes flashing. Nathan doesn’t get it, tries thinking of anything she mentioned about it earlier but nothing comes up. “And… Fuck, I don’t know, Nathan.” She whips her phone out, pushes her shoulder against Nathan’s as if to hide her screen from the world. She goes through a few screens, and there it is. Victoria has already sent a message: _Hi, this is Victoria_ _._ No response, and she points her thumb at her own message. “I just sent that so he’d have my number or whatever. And he, like, said _just for emergencies_ , like I would…fucking…”

She’s breathing fast. The pieces are coming together in a way that isn’t as confusing or frightening. Nathan reaches inside him for something to say.  “…Why are you telling me this _now_?”

“Oh, I don’t fucking know. Maybe because I wanted to party and have a good time without overthinking this like I do with everything?” She pulls away from him. The screen’s glow shuts off, leaving Nathan to search her expression in the dark. “Maybe I just want my friend to listen and…and tell me I’m not completely fucked up. That assuming the worst doesn’t make me, like…like, _wrong_?”

It takes him a moment. Nausea rolls through his stomach, and his hand twitches, as if to reach for her, but he never makes it across that space. “Victoria, fuck, you know that…shit, you’re a girl, like—”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

He blinks. He tries to tell himself that it’s not totally him, that he needs to figure this out, but he can’t find the words to fix this. He licks his drying lips and starts, “…Victoria, is everything okay—?”

“ _Yes_ , Nathan, _fuck_ , do you think I’m some slut like Rachel Amber? Do you think I’d _let_ something like that happen to me?”

“I never said that!” Nathan pauses, takes a deep breath. “Look, I get you’re upset, but…but being pissed off isn’t going to change anything.”

“I _know_!” In the quakes of her voice, there’s a break, reality molding into the fast blinks she manages before looking up, eyes shining. “I know,” she repeats, almost lost amid the unchanging music. “But…I don’t know, I don’t _want_ that to be my first reaction. I fucking hate it. And I-I hate my parents, I hate that they don’t give enough of a shit to fucking tell me how to _deal_ with this, and I hate…” Her breath stutters; Nathan can see in the way her chest trembles, and he does reach out this time, but she swats him away. “Don’t, Nathan.”

“No, I get it—”

“No you _don’t_ , Nathan, at least you’ve always known your dad! Mine waited over half my life to show his fucking face.”

His blood goes cold, and he hates the way he feels his expression shutter over, his mind turn against Victoria as every reasonable part of him echoes _don’t say anything, just shut up for once in your life_. Victoria exhales harshly, gives him an expectant look, and he isn’t fighting hard enough because it makes him burst. “Well, what do you want me to say? _Sorry your dad doesn’t throw meds at you like they’ll make you less of a fuckup? Sorry he didn’t beat the shit out of you when you were younger?_ ”

“Do _not_ make this about you!”

“I’m not, you’re the one that brought family up!” They look at each other for seconds that last hours in his head. A blast of music makes his teeth rattle. He jerks his head down, scuffs his heel absently along the ground, and forces his eyes to be passive when he looks back up. “…I don’t know what you want me to do.”

Victoria’s eyes shift through what feels like a thousand possibilities, each one ending in the same conclusion Nathan fears, and her shoulders sag, making his chest ache deep and endless. “Right,” she tells him. “I don’t know why I expected anything else.”

She leaves. Nathan doesn’t move to stop her.

The girl from earlier forgot her bra on the floor. Nathan remembers the slope of her breasts, the way he stared at them only minutes after him and Evan sat so close, seconds before Victoria started confiding in him. Disgust and shame builds up in his throat, gummy and thick.

The party continues pulsing beyond his reach. He can see it in the slivers between the stereo and the wall, the curtains. He paces because it’s the only thing he can do, but he only manages one loop before he slows to a stop. He bites at his lip and, sensing a bit of copper tang on his tongue, moves to his thumbnail, already short to the quick, and peels off a hangnail with his teeth. His can feel his thumb swell instantly, pulls his hand away to watch it go pink.

His head is full yet so, so quiet.

·

Nathan buys a varsity jacket on Monday and quietly marvels at how no one bothers him for wearing it without being an athlete and how easy it is to keep warmth in his eternally cold arms. He found that second part out when Hayden let him borrow his as they sat out on the cool, rippling grass before they left the party behind, and he still had it cocooned over his shoulders when Hayden dropped him off at the manor. And he realized, when Hayden scrunched his nose as Nathan offered it back and ignored Nathan’s gaze darting up and down the corridor for anyone watching who could misunderstand, that Hayden was serious when he yelled at Zach and Logan that he was quitting varsity.

He’s thankful that him and Victoria aren’t the type to totally ignore each other when they’re fighting like Hayden is with those two, even if she hasn’t texted him and he hasn’t apologized. A bitter, cruel part of him is mad and confused and deeply hurt that she isn’t nearly as forgiving as when he tried confessing how he felt about her.

If anyone notices, they don’t bring it up. Nathan leaves the academic building at lunch with Hayden, where they settle in weird places on campus. They go to the dorm building’s roof at one point; Hayden gives him a copy of the key labelled with _Hookup Area #3.5_ and Nathan has to press a fist to his mouth to keep himself from dissolving into stupid, barking laughter.

Hayden doesn’t ask about him and Victoria, and Nathan doesn’t ask why he quit the football team, and it’s so easy talking with Hayden that Nathan wonders how different things could be if Hayden understood what it’s like, growing up in a family he loves as fiercely as he resents.

Hayden mentions, as smoothly as pointing out the inclement weather or the taste of his dad’s cooking, that he is talking to a guy. Nathan hears the word _pansexual_ where he has only heard _gay_ or _bisexual_ before, and he wants so badly to just talk to Hayden about it, but he doubts this is even the first guy Hayden has been involved with and no way is he admitting to how much he’s been thinking about just a kiss—an _almost_ kiss at that—with Evan Harris.

And he will never, ever admit that the thought of it burns deeper than the aching, weakening pull toward Victoria’s hands.

“Is that…a big deal to you?”

Nathan clears his expression, whatever it was, and shrugs. “I mean… Dude, you know my sister is a straight up lesbian, right?

“Oh, right. …So is that why you gave Logan a black eye last year?”

“What—oh yeah. No. Is that what got around? No, he showed me a picture from my sister’s Instagram and literally said _lemme know how I can lick the salt off that margarita_ —Hayden it’s not that funny.”

He realizes why guys buddy up to Hayden so quickly, why girls don’t hold his sleeping around against him.

The days glide onward. Nathan eases back into old vices little by little, but he tries to look and act as sober as possible during school. Mr. Jefferson tends to call on everyone at least once during class, after all. Nathan’s lucky enough that he knows the answers; he attributes that to his years of photography tutoring and maybe the sudden urgency to do the assigned reading because Evan raises his hand just as much as Victoria does and Nathan can’t handle looking stupid in front of both of them and Mr. Jefferson.

He forgets that they’re getting back their assignments until the very end of class, when Mr. Jefferson pulls out a couple of those envelopes with the string seal from an accordion organizer. He spreads them on the front table, tells them to take theirs at the end of class – he’s one of _those_ teachers who gives students a withering look when they pack up before the bell – and offers a _great work_ here and there.

When Nathan picks up his, he isn’t even looking at him, but Mr. Jefferson claps a hand on his shoulder, says “Keep up the excellent work, Nathan.”

Nathan manages a tight-lipped nod before he leaves.

Victoria is by the lockers, like about half their classmates, undoing the seal.

A strange, uneasy feeling rises in Nathan’s heart, and he walks up to her instead of going straight down the hall like he has been the past week. She eases out a flash of white paper, angled such that he can’t read it, and he says, “Hey, Victoria…”

Her lips tremble into a solid, dense line. She stops reading and puts the paper back in place, then glances sidelong at him, stretching her mouth into an unhappy smile. “Later, I have to get to class, okay?”

The flow of students rushes around them. No one would dare shift him out of place. But Nathan is left like a stone cast out to sea when she starts down the hall. The opposite way from her next class. Toward the girls’ bathroom, maybe.

Nathan sinks back into the plodding stream.

It’s not until later, after lunch where Hayden complains about getting points off for his lighting and framing, after classes of grumbling all around him that the rubric was too harsh and vague, after he wakes up from a half-drunk nap to a text from his sister asking how his junior year is going so far, that he even thinks of looking at his grade. 

His fingers are still stiff and slow under his bleary vision. Nathan messages his sister that he’s fine, he’s been taking his medicine, and he’s perfectly sober. It’s nice to see Kris gushing, less nice to think their parents haven’t updated her on his progress, even if he’s got an empty beer bottle on his bedside table and a few baggies of untouched coke hidden under his mattress, like…well, _drugs_. Then she asks if Victoria’s okay, because she seemed pretty stressed on the phone earlier this week and didn’t answer when Kris asked her about that grade she’s been worrying about.

It’s enough to knock the lingering fuzziness out of his head. He looks down at his phone, chewing on his lip and thinking that should’ve been him acting as the drain to her worries.

He dumps out the graded assignment on his table, on top of his keyboard. The papers fall upside-down. He scoops up one page, a photocopy of his submission with scribbles of comments here and there, and then goes for the packet. A rubric, with even more comments.

At the top is his score: _40/40_.

Nathan frowns.

_A+, an impressive start to the semester._

Nathan can splay his entire hand over the untouched space on the photocopy of his submission.

His mouth sours. Anger and anxiety rolls up and down his throat. He shouldn’t have eaten anything at lunch today.

…Hayden got a _25_.

A part of him—a naïve, deeply selfish part—wants to go to Evan Harris first. He can imagine it too, him pounding on Evan’s door and shoving his assignment in his disgruntled face, demanding that he score it. Nathan will act pissed no matter what number he gives and _be_ pissed when Evan’s face falls after he gives him the actual number.

_I wish I could photograph like you._

He takes a deep breath.

_Right. I don’t know why I expected anything else._

His exhale lasts a few seconds longer. Dr. Bill’s book warns against it, something about the possibility of passing out, but he doesn’t get that Nathan doesn’t have panic attacks, no snotty hyperventilation or sobs so hard that breathing is painful. He just freaks out, has meltdowns, fucks up so often it’s a part of the package, something he isn’t proud but can’t really change.

His radio alarm clock says it’s a little after seven. He pushes the blinds aside, not yet willing to open them since his room is so close to the ground and the fewer shadows in his room the better, and sees the sun is still out.

Nathan shoves his assignment back into the envelope, packs his bag, and locks his door before he leaves.

·

The last orgs are gone by the time he makes it to the academic building. He thumbed at a cigarette in his pocket the entire way over. He’ll smoke later, but if he pulls this off he’ll let himself do a line.

A part of him knows that Victoria might be even more upset at him for this. The fact of the matter is that he knows she can do it on her own; it’s what comes along with that that’s the problem. Victoria has gotten straight A’s for as long as Nathan has known her, and when he first met her, she already knew how to expertly conceal the dark rings under her eyes.

The few times Nathan had a meal with Victoria’s family felt like a bizarre mirror of whenever Victoria came over to the manor. Her parents asked him questions about himself, where he grew up, his photography, his sister’s school, his family’s company. They were smiling the entire time, and Nathan tried not to watch Victoria’s fingers curling in the white napkin on her lap. Anne only spoke to Victoria twice, once to tell her to cut her food into smaller pieces, and once to tell her that her lipstick was getting on her chin. Richard Chase, whose nose Victoria inherited and seemingly little else, barely looked in her direction.

Mr. Jefferson’s office is near the main stairwell. Nathan pauses at the open door and feels remarkably stupid, like he’s nine again and waiting at his dad’s study. He rolls his eyes and steps into the threshold of the narrow room, squinting against the glare of the late afternoon light between the window shutters.

The room itself is maybe half the size of his dad’s study, narrow enough that Mr. Jefferson’s desk is placed sideways, with bookshelves embedded in the walls. This used to be Principal Wells’s office; Nathan remembers that much from visiting when Kris was going to Blackwell, but Mark Jefferson looks like he belongs here. He’s scrolling through something on his laptop and has two fingers at his temple.

Between the oversaturated bars where the sunlight hits, he looks gray, almost monochrome, and Nathan wonders, mouth quirking smugly, what would happen if he got his phone out and took a candid of him right now. A tinge of disappointment evens his face out when he realizes he missed the chance to turn that in as his assignment; that’d be funny, and at least he would’ve gotten an honest grade on it. Maybe he would’ve gotten away with it, too.

It occurs to Nathan that he could stand here for minutes and Mr. Jefferson wouldn’t take his eyes off that screen.

Nathan rolls his eyes and knocks on the wall.

Mr. Jefferson glances over, doesn’t even turn his head until his face warms with recognition and he nods at Nathan, smiling. “Ah, Nathan. Please, come in.” And he gestures at the seat by the side of his desk.

Nathan shuts the door behind him.

“I think you might be the only student who hasn’t come to office hours yet. Regardless, I’m glad you showed up. As you can imagine, most visitors today have been a little…stressed.”

“What a plot twist,” Nathan says as he sits down.

Mr. Jefferson smiles, kind and amused, and Nathan feels his own mouth pull toward a smirk before he remembers he can’t budge on this one. Mr. Jefferson’s eyes flicker as Nathan sets his mouth firm, and he lowers the screen of his laptop. “What can I help you with?”

A part of Nathan wants to go about this the way Kris would, but she’s never been confrontational unless it was a major issue. He thinks of his dad, his mom, the ways they gather what they want, sometimes through slow coercion, sometimes by long-established intimidation.

Nathan isn’t one for formalities.

He pulls his bag unzipped and grabs his graded assignment, then slaps it, nearly _throws_ it with the force he uses, on the desk. “What the fuck is this?”

Nathan can imagine – can practically _see_ it in the bemused curve of Mr. Jefferson’s mouth – him holding back the urge to say _hopefully_ _your assignment because the alternative is that someone else snuck into your house to take a picture and turned that in_.

In his peripheral vision, he sees that he has placed the photocopy such that it is right-side up for neither of them, and he exhales, slow, through his nose. “Look, I’m not gonna pretend that I actually _earned_ that A, and it’d be great if you didn’t either.”

The condescension or hint of guilt he expects doesn’t come, just curiosity and patience, and it steadies and annoys Nathan in almost equal amounts.

“Okay,” he continues, rubbing at his eye, “I get it, like, if my dad told you to, fucking, bump up my grades. But I’ve actually been doing the fucking readings and participating and shit, and, like, maybe you felt bad for me after you saw it or whatever but this shit isn’t nice or anything, it’s fucking…condescending, or whatever, all of you thinking I can’t do it on my own.” And maybe he can’t, but that’s not for someone else to decide, not when it comes to the one thing he’s maybe good at.

“Believe me, Nathan, when I say I did view your work critically.” He turns the photocopy around. Nathan stares down at it because it’s more comfortable than watching Mr. Jefferson speak. “I wanted to take points off for the use of negative space on the left, which initially seemed odd given the angle of the subjects and pieces involved relative to the lens, but then I noticed this.”

Nathan took the photo on a Sunday, two days before the assignment was due, half-asleep and halting at the glass sliding doors at the back of the manor on his way to the kitchen. It was partially open, and just beyond that space at the side his parents sat at the patio table watching the sunrise. The purples and pinks of the clear sky drenched their skin, their hair. The third chair had his mother’s purse seeping under the armrests.

He framed it so it seems like a postcard or stamp, slivers of the white wall and paneled wood floors around the glass denying any sort of spontaneity. Nathan knows his parents worked hard for moments like that, even if he can’t help but resent them for leaving no room for him to join them.

The space Mr. Jefferson gestures at is at an undisturbed pane of glass through which is the stone patio below, the manicured grass and trees between, and the soft colors of the sky above. With the framing, it makes the rest of the shot look cramped and lazy. But at just the right angle, there’s the dim reflection of a boy with his face faded into the sky above the mouth and a camera in his loose hands.

It’s far from Nathan’s greatest work, but Mr. Jefferson said that they wouldn’t have to present their submissions. The only emotion there is an old, tired dissatisfaction that pales beneath the pictures he has seen: Hayden’s grandma walking down a busy boardwalk with a lei and beads about her shoulders and college kids giggling at her wicked smile, one of Evan’s observations of the manic energy that pervades the general Vortex Club partygoers’ experience, the main exhibition in the Chase Space’s summer feature that had a portrait of a mother at a water pump as attendees flitted about in the foreground with wineglasses and finger foods and not a single stare toward the woman with fierce, exhausted eyes.

Nathan lets an unhappy grin cut up his face. “What if I said that wasn’t on purpose?”

“I’d say I don’t believe you,” Mr. Jefferson replies so candidly that it gives Nathan pause. “I assume you’re comparing your grade to your friends’?”

“I guess.” He lifts one shoulder and looks away, picking at the skin on his palm. “…I mean, Victoria showed me her photo before she passed it in, and it…” It’s one of her best works, he thinks, and it’s a shame that it features another published work of art because he thinks she would’ve had a shot of getting it in a gallery otherwise. “She’s good,” he finishes, lamely.

“Oh, absolutely. But it isn’t quite what I was looking for. Were she to apply more focus to the gallery attendants I’d consider it a stolen, unstaged moment, so while the piece itself is powerful, the execution defeats the point of the assignment.”

He’s not wrong. Nathan, mouth coiled with dissatisfaction, looks at Mr. Jefferson, and sees that he knows that as well. “Shouldn’t I get points off too, then? You said so yourself, I’m in the scene, so can it really be considered _captured_?”

And for once Mr. Jefferson’s eyes widen a fraction before he breathes out a soft, almost disbelieving laugh, but his smile is edged toward something more genuine. Nathan can’t help but let his own mouth soften, because he sort of expected a pretentious spiel about how an artist should never compromise their own work. Instead, he gets, “Okay, okay. I’ll admit, maybe I am a bit biased. But seeing your work now – along with everything Blackwell’s previous photographer teacher left for me – I’m glad to see the improvement from those photos I reviewed for you all that time ago.” Nathan can tell how badly his attempt to keep the color in his face fails by the quirk in Mr. Jefferson’s eyebrow. “Ah. …Well. This is awkward.”

Nathan openly cringes, mostly because that manila folder is in his room at the manor, layered under a box of tissues and an empty stapler.

He treated it with the same willful ignorance as his graded essays and exams, but Nathan did see the first page a while back, and the task of deciphering Mark Jefferson’s words coupled with the weight of having an actual, professional artist weigh in on his work—and even the first page was strewn with black marks indicating spots where the lighting would be improved, a better place to have the horizon bisect the frame, and one checkmark where the figure at the end of the boardwalk is positioned, purposefully off-center—pinned him to the ground.

“I understand if you didn’t have the chance to look them over,” Jefferson says, perhaps taking pity on the stupid look on his face. “I know I came off as imposing, but you do have a gift, and my job now is to help you transition that into a career.”

He should come up with something clever enough to convince them both it’s not a big deal, him saying that, because a decent amount of people tell him his photography isn’t bad, even if Nathan doubts it’s worth anything most of the time. But so few people look at him honestly like this. It’s fake, he thinks—he _wants_ _to_ think, because there’s no room in his life for the alternative—but the fury and embarrassment has deflated and soaked into the part of his mind where he stores his mistakes to reel over later.

Nathan shakes his head instead, tries to sound casual, but his voice comes out as a rumbling whisper, “Thanks but…it’s not like my dad would let me be anything other than his legacy anyway.”

Here’s where Kris tells him all he has to do is prove to his dad that he’s better off being a photographer. Here’s where Dr. Bill says his dad needing him to take over the company is his father’s trust and affection bleeding through. Here’s where Victoria and Hayden breathe deep from their blunts because they know why all those assurances are wrong.

Mr. Jefferson’s stare changes to something measuring. “Nathan, I can assure you that you’re unlike your father in all the ways that matter. You can absolutely make it.”

It hits like a knife to the chest. He exhales, blinks, explores just _how_ he should respond to that—

“I’ll look over Victoria’s grade. I’m going to be the stereotypical teacher and say you shouldn’t downgrade the quality of your own work, but it always helps to have a self-critical eye. And I deeply respect that you’d go through the trouble of helping a close friend.”

He feels his face go warm. Nathan trails his tongue over his teeth and considers what to say. “I mean, it’s…it’s not a big deal. I know Victoria’ll be, like, successful but it’s what she gives up for that that makes me worried.”

Nathan glances back up, sees all that amused curiosity and sneers, shuffling his papers back into order, but Mr. Jefferson doesn’t laugh, just says, “I wouldn’t be too worried. She’s gotten straight A’s so far, hasn’t she?”

It’s true, but it means rejection letters she doesn’t throw away, snapping at Nathan when he comes across her writing journal, a step-mom who will spend an entire dinner asking Nathan about his dull aspirations and speaking to Victoria only to pick her apart.

“Yeah,” Nathan replies.

The night flares through the windows. Nathan packs up and sees Mr. Jefferson checking his wristwatch, then shutting his laptop entirely. “Again, I’m glad you finally came to office hours, Nathan. Truthfully, no one tends to attend extended office hours,” he adds with a self-derisive grin.

“…Thanks. I’ll…look at your review.”

Nathan slings his bag over his shoulder, nods tightly, and heads out. The door knocks against an adjacent wall even though he didn’t push it open that hard, but he doesn’t get a reprimand. David Madsen, the new chief of security, isn’t there to question his presence either, but going through the grass back on campus, he lights up a cigarette and it’s easy enough to ignore the rising well of distrust and how his instinct, for the first time, is to douse the swell before feeding it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Author's notes here.](https://grey-amethyst.tumblr.com/post/168909272592/the-company-i-keep-im-sorry-this-chapter-took)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm happy to hear comments and suggestions, but please bear in mind how someone's experiences may relate to the content that is in, and will be in, this story. Please respect that I am not comfortable with people who fetishize the abusive relationship that will be explored in this fic or portray it in a way that is not respectful of the canonical impact it had on Nathan commenting on this work.


End file.
